Warehouse picking methods and waves

Where to find it: OTO PACK → Operations → Wave Picking — Open in OTO ↗

Picking is where warehouse labour is won or lost. The item is the same either way; what changes is how far someone walks to reach it, and how many orders that walk serves.

The four strategies

OTO PACK supports four, and the right one depends on what your order profile looks like rather than on which is most sophisticated.

Strategy	How it works	Best for
Single order picking	One picker, one order, start to finish. A wave is created for that single order.	High-priority orders where the clock on that order is what matters.
Batch picking	Orders with overlapping items are grouped so the same bin is visited once for several orders.	Warehouses where many orders contain the same few products.
Wave picking	One picker handles several orders in one pass, reducing average time per order.	General throughput. Wave size is tunable in Advanced.
Zone picking	Pickers are assigned to zones and only pick within theirs; the order is assembled from several zones.	Large warehouses, or ones with specialised areas and teams.

The trade-offEvery strategy past single-order picking buys walking time with sorting time: pick many orders together and you must afterwards separate them. That is what the Sorting stage is for, and why it is a tab of its own.

Waves

A wave is a batch of picking work, and it is the unit the whole picking stage is organized around. Waves are visible at OTO PACK → Operations → Wave Picking.

Creating waves

Three ways, in increasing order of leaving you alone:

Method	What it is
By hand	Select orders and make a wave of them. Necessary for a rush order.
Wave Creation Pilot	A two-step guided tool — Select Orders, then Create Wave — that filters the pending orders into a sensible grouping for you.
Automatic wave creation	Waves are formed on rules without anyone asking, so pickers always have work queued.

Wave Creation Pilot — Fig. 1 — Pick a warehouse and a type of order; the counters above the list show how many SKUs and orders the filter has caught before you commit to a wave.

Order segregation — the four types

The pilot’s Type of Orders filter is where segregation actually happens. Four types, and each produces a materially different kind of picking round:

Type	What lands in the wave	Why group them
Single Item Orders	Orders of one item.	The fastest wave in any warehouse — no sorting stage at all, because every pick is an order. Run these as their own wave and they fly.
Identical Orders	Orders containing the same items as each other.	One bin visit serves many orders. The purest form of batch picking.
Multiple Item Orders	Orders with several lines.	These need sorting afterwards, so keeping them together keeps the sorting station busy in one block instead of trickling.
Unique Orders	Orders whose items nothing else in the queue shares.	Nothing to be gained by batching them, so they are best isolated rather than left to dilute a wave that would otherwise be efficient.

The single-item wave is the easy winIf you do nothing else with segregation, separate the single-item orders. They skip sorting entirely, which is the most expensive stage in a multi-order pick — and in most consumer catalogues they are a large share of the day’s volume.

The list beneath shows each candidate order with its SKU’s, Quantities and Total Quantity, all filterable, so a wave can be trimmed by hand before it is created.

Wave size

Tunable in Advanced, and one of the few genuinely consequential numbers in a warehouse. Waves that are too small waste the walk; too large and the sorting stage becomes the bottleneck, and a single problem item holds up more orders.

Assigning pickers

Two models, matching the two editions:

Edition	How work reaches a picker
Basic	A supervisor assigns pickers to orders.
Advanced	Picker assignment automation distributes wave tasks without a supervisor in the loop.

Zones can carry a default picker, so work in a zone routes to its owner automatically.

Sorting and consolidation

After a multi-order pick, items are separated into their orders at a sorting station. The app directs each item to its slot: scan the product and it tells you which bin it belongs in. As the screen puts it, “Scan the product you want to locate in sorting bins.” That direction is what makes the stage reliable. Sorting by eye against a printed list is exactly where a multi-order pick gives back what it saved.

Sorting in the app — Fig. 2 — The Fill / Empty toggle is the whole stage in two words — filling bins from the pick, then emptying them into packing.

Mode	What you are doing
Fill	Distributing a completed pick into the sorting bins, one order per bin.
Empty	Taking a finished bin out — its order is complete and ready to pack.

Either mode accepts a scan or a typed SKU or Barcode Number, so a damaged label does not stop the line.

Serial numbers

Where products are serialised, the serial number is validated during picking rather than at packing. Catching the wrong unit at the bin, rather than at the bench, avoids an unnecessary walk back — and for high-value or warranty-tracked goods it ties a specific unit to a specific order from the earliest possible moment. See Product configuration for how serialisation is set up.

Picking an item

The ITEMS screen is where a picker spends the walk. It opens with one instruction — Scan bin location — because the first thing to establish is that the picker is standing at the right shelf, not that they are holding the right product.

Each item carries what someone at a shelf needs to identify it without hesitating:

On the item	Why it is there
Photo and product name	Faster and more certain than a description, particularly across a language barrier.
SKU and barcode	Both shown, because either can be scanned and either might be the label on the box.
Bin locations	Every bin holding this SKU, listed on the item itself.
Progress badge	Picked against required — `0/100` until the count is made up.

One SKU, several bins

The bin table beneath is the part that matters on a real warehouse floor. It lists every bin holding the item with its Available quantity, and a separate QTY stepper per bin. So a picker needing 100 units, facing 100 in one bin and 151 in another, decides where to take them from — and records it. The system knows which bin was drawn down, not merely that the item left the building.

This is what keeps bin counts trueA system that only records the item was picked loses track of where stock actually sits within a week. Recording the bin at the moment of picking is what makes cycle counts match, replenishment suggestions sensible, and the next picker’s walk short.It also gives the picker a choice they are qualified to make — take from the bin that is closer, or the one that is nearly empty and wants clearing.

When picking goes wrong

Stock that should be there sometimes is not. The screen offers Not Available alongside Complete, so a short pick is a first-class outcome rather than an error: the picker records what was actually found, and the order continues on that basis instead of stalling.

Short picks are dataA bin that repeatedly short-picks is a bin whose count is wrong. Reading partial picks as a signal rather than an inconvenience is the cheapest inventory accuracy programme available — it is the same information a cycle count would have cost you a shift to discover.And because the bin was recorded at the point of picking, you know which bin to go and look at.

Inbound and putaway — bins and zones, which decide how far anyone walks.
Packing and dispatch — what happens to a completed wave.
Hubs Management — picking method configured per hub.

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Warehouse picking methods and waves

The four strategies