Pick Sequence IDs

Overview

When picking a multi item order, or picking a bulk batch - by default the system will sort the list of items to pick in Alphanumeric location order.

This results in straight lines of picking, however this may not be desirable or the most efficient way to pick all items depending on your warehouse setup - as it can lead to walking back to the start of the aisle to start picking again.

Using pick sequence IDs can overcome this by assigning an ID priority to each location, which can then setup picking in zig-zags across aisles or snake patterns around the end of the aisles.

Here's how the walking route would look like without pick sequencing:

And here's the difference with pick sequence IDs added (there would need to be space at the end of the aisles for a picker to walk through for this example to work in real life:

So its considerably less walking to do, however it does mean a lot more work for location data management

Setup

Adding pick sequence ID for the above example is relatively straight forward but may be time consuming if you have a lot of locations to enter IDs for.

The sequence ID only has to be unique for each zone you have in your warehouse.

Its best to add them using a spreadsheet - go to Warehouse > Extras > Upload Locations

Download the template and fill in the sequence IDs in the order of location you want to pick from, for my example above - it would look like this:

You can see the key difference is that the first location in Aisle B is B001, usually this would be the 10th location to pick from, but we have changed its pick sequence ID to 18, so it will be the last location in this aisle to pick from - and now the first location is reversed to B009 because it has a pick sequence ID of 10.

Adding Sequence IDs for Existing Locations

If you have already uploaded your locations to Mintsoft without pick sequence IDs, then you'll need to bulk export these out of the system.

Go to Warehouse > Manage Warehouse

Then click on the locations button the right hand side of the warehouse you want to change.

Then hit the bulk CSV export on the top right of that screen

Crucially, this will export our internal ID for the location in column A (do not delete, or adjust these values)

Then enter your pick sequence IDs as required.