One of the first questions we ask when we look at a packing area is simple: who picks the orders, and who packs them? In a lot of warehouses the answer is "everyone does everything". Each person takes an order, walks the aisles to collect it, brings it back to a bench and packs it. That works well when you're small. But as volumes grow, splitting the job between a picking team and a packing team usually wins. Here's why, and how to stop the handover becoming a problem.
When one person picking and packing makes sense
If you send a modest number of orders a day, pick and pack by one person has real advantages:
- No handover. The order never waits in a queue between two people.
- Simple to manage. One task, one person, one measure of output.
- Less space. You don't need a staging area for picked orders waiting to be packed.
The problem is that every packer is also a walker. Time spent in the aisles is time away from the bench, and once you're shipping hundreds of parcels a day that walking becomes the biggest cost in the operation. Large orders are awkward too: carrying big cartons round the warehouse to pack as you go rarely works.
The case for separate picking and packing teams
1. People get very good at one job. Pickers learn the locations and the fastest routes. Packers learn the carton sizes, the packing standards and the quirks of each product. Both get faster, and both make fewer mistakes.
2. You can batch pick. Once pickers aren't packing, they can collect items for several orders in one trip round the warehouse. That cuts walking dramatically when lots of orders share the same products. The items are then split into individual orders at the packing station.
3. You get a second check. When the packer is a different person from the picker, every order is effectively checked twice. Packing is the last chance to catch a wrong item or a missing one before it reaches the customer, so it's the right place to build in a scan or a check.
4. Packers stay at the station. This is where productivity really comes from. A packer who stays within a metre of a well-organised packing station, with cartons, tape, labels and void fill all to hand, will pack far more orders an hour than one who keeps leaving the bench. We wrote about this in how to get the most from a gravity conveyor: count the transfers and the steps, and the right layout becomes obvious.
5. Better packing. A dedicated packer has time to choose the right carton and pack it properly, which cuts damage, returns and wasted packaging.
The catch: keeping the two teams in step
Splitting the teams creates a handover, and that's where things go wrong. Either picked orders pile up waiting for a packer, or packers stand idle waiting for work. Research from the Universities of Bath and Cambridge, using data from an online retailer's warehouse, found that packing is often the real bottleneck. Making picking faster on its own doesn't get more parcels out of the door if the packing stations can't keep up. Their work also suggested that smaller, more frequent waves of orders help keep picking and packing balanced.
That matches what we see on site. A few practical rules:
- Agree a buffer. Decide how much picked work should be waiting at the packing area (half an hour? an hour?) and pick to that level, not beyond it. We made the same point in what we can learn from the Mini factory: a common rhythm matters more than a big holding area.
- Size the packing area properly. If packing is your bottleneck, more or better-equipped packing stations will raise output more than anything you do in the aisles.
- Cross-train. Keep a few people who can switch between picking and packing to cover peaks and absences.
- Plan the flow. Picked goods should arrive at one side of the packing station and packed parcels leave from the other, ideally onto a conveyor that takes them to despatch. See what is the best layout for a packing area.
So which should you choose?
As a rough guide, if you're sending a few dozen orders a day, one person picking and packing is fine. Once you're into the hundreds of parcels a day, separate teams almost always pay off, provided the packing area is designed to keep up.
That's exactly what our packing stations and gravity roller conveyors are designed for: a dedicated packer, everything within reach, and packed parcels rolling away to despatch. If you'd like help working out the right balance for your operation, book a design consultation or call us on 01722 697916.
