Picking multiple orders at the same time

Table of contents

Introduction

Rather than picking one order at a time, you may wish to combine several orders onto a single pick list. This improves productivity and reduces the number of trips through the warehouse that the operators have to make.

In Ongoing WMS, such combined pick lists are called pick orders. Each order is automatically assigned a specific bin number in the pick order. After printing the pick order, a warehouse operator can make a single trip through the warehouse with a picking cart and pick all orders on the pick order at the same time.

Working with pick orders, basic use-case

The below steps describe the most basic use-case when working with pick orders.

Step 1: allocation

We assume that you are comfortable with creating and allocating orders in Ongoing. It is described in this tutorial how to do that.

For demonstration purposes, we have created 5 orders which we have allocated:

Order list with five orders in the status Allocated.

Step 2: creating the pick order

We wish to combine the above five orders onto a single pick order, and generate a single pick list for them. This is done by checking all the orders in Orders ⇒ Order list, and then pressing Create pick order:

Five orders are selected and the button saying Create pick order is circled.

When we check the order list now, we see that the system has created a pick order with ID 46 and added all of the orders to that pick order. Each order has been assigned its own bin:

View of the Pick order column and Bin column for the five orders.

In order for the status of the orders to change from "Allocated" to "Picked", mark the orders and click the Pick button (located below the Create pick order button).

Step 3: printing the combined pick list

In the order list, select any order and then print Pick list (pick order):

View of available reports, with Pick list (pick order) circled.

The pick list is ordered by location, meaning that you only have to visit each location once, even though you are picking five separate orders. Each line tells you which quantity to put into which bin:

Generated pick list.

Editing a pick order

After you have created a pick order, you may wish to add or remove orders from it. Go to Warehouse ⇒ Pick orders. You will see a list of all pick orders. Click Edit on the one you wish to modify. You will be shown a screen which looks like this:

Two lists of orders. Between them are two buttons pointing left and right.

The right-hand side contains all orders which the pick order currently contains. The left-hand side contains all other orders. The >> button can be used to add orders to the pick order, and << button can be used to remove orders from the pick order.

Automatically creating pick orders

In the above guide, we made a manual choice for which orders we wanted on a particular pick order. If you have a large number of orders to process each day, this may be too time-consuming. It is possible to automate the creation of pick orders in various ways, e.g. you can have logic such as this:

Please contact Ongoing if you wish to have this set up.

Video on how to pick multiple orders in Ongoing WMS