When your warehouse runs slowly, everything behind it feels the drag. Orders go out late, employees get frustrated, and customers start wondering where their stuff is. That’s why speed matters so much. It’s not about rushing like your coffee just kicked in. It’s about cutting wasted motion.<\/p>\n
One smart way businesses improve picking speed is by using order pickers<\/a> when items are stored up high. These machines help workers reach products safely and efficiently without turning every pick into a climb-and-stretch event. If your team handles a lot of shelf-level inventory, that kind of equipment can make a real difference.<\/p>\n Speed also protects your margins. The longer it takes to pull, pack, and stage an order, the more labor each shipment eats up. Over time, smoother movement through the warehouse saves more than minutes. It saves money, patience, and maybe a few dramatic sighs.<\/p>\n A lot of warehouse problems don’t look dramatic at first. They show up as little annoyances that keep repeating. A worker walks across the building to grab one missing item. A cart blocks an aisle. Labels are hard to read. Someone has to wait because the only lifting equipment is already in use.<\/p>\n These hiccups slow down the whole team. One delay often creates another. If your pick path is messy, workers spend more time zigzagging than actually picking. If fast-moving items are stored in awkward spots, you’re basically asking your team to play hide-and-seek with inventory.<\/p>\n Clutter is another sneaky troublemaker. Overflow boxes, unclear staging areas, and random temporary storage can make a warehouse feel like it was organized by a tornado. That confusion leads to more mistakes, more backtracking, and more tired employees.<\/p>\n When customers get the wrong item or their package ships late, they don’t see a workflow problem. They just see poor service. That’s why fixing these basic snags matters so much.<\/p>\n You don’t need to overhaul everything at once. Often, the best results come from a mix of small and practical changes. A cleaner shelf layout can shorten travel time. Bigger, clearer labels can cut down on errors. Even better carts can save workers from making extra trips.<\/p>\n Barcode scanners help too, especially when your team handles lots of similar products. They make it easier to confirm the right item without relying on memory or squinting at tiny print. That may not sound exciting, but accuracy is a beautiful thing when returns are expensive.<\/p>\n Then there’s the equipment side. If staff regularly reach high shelves, move bulky products, or pick items across multiple levels, specialized lifting tools can keep the process safe and efficient. The goal isn’t to buy shiny gadgets just because they look impressive. It’s to give your team tools that match the job.<\/p>\n Think of it like cooking with the right pan. You can make dinner with the wrong one, sure, but it’s going to be slower, messier, and a lot less fun.<\/p>\n Even the best equipment won’t help much if nobody uses it well. That’s where training comes in. And no, this doesn’t have to mean long lectures that make everyone stare at the clock. Good training is simple, practical, and tied to daily tasks.<\/p>\n Start with movement habits. Show employees the best pick routes, where staged orders belong, and how to avoid blocking work zones. Make sure they know how to use lifting equipment safely and when not to improvise. Warehouses are not the place for “I’ve got this” energy.<\/p>\n Clear communication also matters more than people think. If one shift leaves things in odd places or skips updates, the next shift loses time trying to figure out what happened. A quick handoff routine can prevent a lot of confusion.<\/p>\n Onboarding matters too. New hires should learn the layout, the tools, and the standards before they’re thrown into the deep end. When people know what good work looks like, they’re more likely to do it right the first time.<\/p>\n Not every warehouse needs a big investment right away. Sometimes your current setup is good enough for now. But there are clear signs that it may be time to level up.<\/p>\n If your order volume has grown and your team is constantly scrambling, that’s one clue. If workers are walking too much, reaching awkwardly, or waiting on the same shared equipment every day, that’s another. Rising mistakes, damaged items, and frequent delays usually mean the system is under strain.<\/p>\n You should also pay attention to team fatigue. If people seem more worn out than the workload should justify, the setup may be forcing too much unnecessary effort. A better layout or more suitable equipment can reduce that strain.<\/p>\n Upgrades don’t have to be flashy. They just need to solve a real problem. The smartest improvements usually come from watching where time gets wasted and where frustration keeps showing up. If the same issue pops up every week, your warehouse is basically asking for help in capital letters.<\/p>\n Cutting wasted motion is the phrase used a few sections above, and it is almost word for word the life’s work of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth. Frank started as a bricklayer’s apprentice in the 1880s and noticed something that bothered him: no two bricklayers did the job the same way, and most of what any of them did was not laying bricks. He redesigned the scaffold, moved the mortar board, changed where the bricks were stacked, and got the motions per brick down from roughly eighteen to about four or five. Daily output went from around a thousand bricks per worker to well over two thousand, and nobody was working harder.<\/p>\n Lillian supplied the half that Frederick Taylor’s stopwatch school kept forgetting. She took a doctorate in psychology and spent her career arguing that fatigue and how the work felt to the person doing it were data too, not sentiment.<\/p>\n Their most portable invention for a warehouse is the therblig, their word for an elementary unit of work, built from their own surname spelled backwards. The list opens with search, find, select, grasp, position, transport loaded. Read that sequence beside a picking round and the overlap gets uncomfortable. Search and select are what somebody does when the label is unreadable. Transport is what they do all day.<\/p>\n The frame has limits, and they are sharp ones. Motion study drew real hostility from organized labor, which read it as a stopwatch pointed at a human being, and the American Federation of Labor singled it out for particular disapproval. The scholarly record on Gilbreth’s own flagship project at the New England Butt Company is also unflattering: the large output gain he advertised came mostly from handing time-consuming parts of the job to other workers, not from the micromotion analysis he was selling. Which is, as it happens, the single most useful thing in the story.<\/p>\n Workers spending more time zigzagging than actually picking is correct, and it is also measurable, which makes it strange that nobody ever puts a figure on it. Tompkins and colleagues, in the standard facilities planning textbook, put travel at roughly half of total order picking time. Bartholdi and Hackman break it down further: travelling 55 percent, searching 15, extracting 10, paperwork and everything else 20. Order picking as a whole runs to something like 55 percent of total warehouse operating cost. Multiply those and roughly a third of what a warehouse spends is people walking.<\/p>\n Bartholdi and Hackman’s conclusion is blunt. Travel is the largest cost contributor and has to be the first candidate for improvement. First, not fourth. The advice above reaches layout eventually and treats it as one item on a list beside better carts and clearer labels, when slotting is not an item on the list. It is the list.<\/p>\n There is also an awkward corollary sitting inside the equipment recommendation. Order pickers earn their keep when items are stored up high, which is true. But which items are up high is a decision somebody made with a labeling gun. ABC slotting says the fastest-moving fifth of your SKUs belong in the golden zone, roughly waist to shoulder height, as close to packing as you can get them, while the slow movers go to the top beam and the back of the building. If your fast movers are up on the third level, you are about to buy a machine to solve a problem you created for free.<\/p>\n None of which is an argument against the equipment. It is an argument for pointing it at the right shelves. Fix the slotting, then buy the picker for the inventory that genuinely belongs at height, which in most buildings is the large majority of it.<\/p>\n Making sure people know how to use lifting equipment safely is how the training section puts it, which describes a federal obligation as a friendly suggestion. Under 29 CFR 1910.178(l), an employer has to give every powered industrial truck operator formal instruction, practical training, and an evaluation of their performance in the actual workplace, then certify in writing that they are competent. The certificate has to name the operator, give the training date and the evaluation date, and name whoever did the evaluating. Performance gets re-evaluated at least once every three years.<\/p>\n The part that bears directly on an upgrade decision is the refresher trigger list. Retraining is required when an operator is seen working unsafely, when they are involved in an accident or a near miss, when an evaluation finds them operating unsafely, when a workplace condition changes in a way that could affect safe operation, and when the operator is assigned a different type of truck. An order picker is a different type of truck. So on the day the machine arrives, everybody who will touch it needs training and a fresh evaluation before they touch it, and the certification is specific both to the truck type and to your building.<\/p>\n There is a second difference that catches people out. Because the operator platform rises with the load, an order picker normally calls for a body harness and lanyard anchored to the platform, which a sit-down counterbalance forklift does not. That is a purchase in its own right, plus inspection intervals and training on how to wear the thing properly, and it belongs in the budget next to the truck rather than as a surprise in week two.<\/p>\n Worth confirming your own position rather than taking a guest article’s word for it. Requirements vary by state plan, and the manufacturer’s manual carries conditions of its own that sit on top of the federal floor.<\/p>\n Watching where time gets wasted is good advice about your own operation, and you are the world expert on your own operation. Every decision that advice points toward, though, involves bringing in somebody you have never worked with: a dealer, a racking installer, a slotting consultant, a software vendor. That is a different kind of problem, and the article stops right at its edge.<\/p>\n The way most warehouse managers solve it is by asking the two or three peers they happen to know. That works beautifully up to the boundary of your own address book and then stops dead. Somebody running a mid-size distribution operation might have three trusted contacts in the trade, and beyond them every vendor is a stranger and so are they. What felt like diligence turns out to have been a sample of three. This is why industrial buying leans on certifications and demonstrated capability rather than star ratings<\/a>, in a way consumer markets never really have to.<\/p>\n The thing you are actually buying is not the machine. Order pickers from the established makers are more alike than the brochures suggest. What varies enormously is the service wrapped around them: how fast a technician appears, whether the parts sit on a shelf within a day’s drive, and whether anyone picks up the phone on a Saturday when the platform is stuck at height with a full pallet on it.<\/p>\nCommon workflow snags<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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<\/p>\nTools that pull weight<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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<\/p>\nTraining still counts<\/strong><\/h2>\n
When to upgrade<\/strong><\/h2>\n
The man who counted the motions<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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<\/p>\nThe number this article stops just short of<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Buying a different truck is a legal event<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Where the recommendation runs out<\/strong><\/h2>\n
What you can check about a dealer before you sign<\/strong><\/h2>\n