Picks per hour

How picks per hour is worked out

The sum is the number of picks completed, divided by the hours spent picking. The first half is a count your warehouse software already keeps. The second half is where the argument usually sits, because a shift is not all picking: briefings, replenishment, loading and cleaning are real work, and if you leave them in the hours, the figure says a good team is slow. Decide once whether you are measuring picking time or paid time, write the decision down, and keep to it.

Decide what counts as a pick as well. Most warehouses count one order line as one pick, however many units that line holds. Counting individual units gives a much larger number for exactly the same work, so the two versions cannot be compared, not even between two zones of the same building.

There is a picks per hour calculator on this site if you want to put your own shift through it.

There is no good number

A wholesaler whose pickers take full cases from pallet locations on a forklift lands somewhere entirely different from an online cosmetics shop picking single items out of small bins, and both can be well run. The figure depends on what you sell, how it is stored, how far people walk and how large an order is. Comparing yourself with the warehouse down the road tells you very little. Comparing this month against your own last month, zone by zone, tells you a great deal.

Read it next to picking accuracy. Picks per hour rises when people hurry, and so does the share of lines picked wrong, so the two figures only mean something together.

In practice

Take a team of six. The shift is seven and a half hours, of which half an hour goes on the morning briefing and tidying up at the end. That leaves seven hours each, or 42 hours of picking. Over the shift the team completes 3,780 picks. 3,780 divided by 42 is 90 picks per hour.

Next month the same team completes 4,200 picks in the same 42 hours, which is 100 picks per hour. Before calling that an improvement, check whether the orders were larger: ten lines picked in one trip down an aisle cost far less walking per line than two lines picked in the same trip. The figures here are an illustration, not measurements from a real warehouse.

What moves the figure

• How far people walk. In most manual warehouses, walking takes more of the hour than picking does. Shortening routes moves the figure further than asking people to move faster.
• How orders are grouped. Picking several orders in one pass through the aisles spreads the walking over more lines. So does sorting a pick list into location order rather than order-line order.
• Where the fast movers sit. A short list of items accounts for most of the picks in almost every warehouse. Putting those close to the packing bench changes the average on its own.
• Whether stock is where the system says it is. A picker who cannot find an item stops picking and starts searching, which is why stock accuracy shows up in this figure.
• Replenishment. An empty pick face sends the picker to a pallet rack or to a colleague. Topping up between waves rather than during them keeps that out of the hour.
• How picks are confirmed. Scanning each line costs a second or two and buys you accuracy. Confirming a whole order in one action is faster and tells you nothing about what actually went in the box.