What is Pick to Voice? Benefits & More

Pick to Voice Order Picking

Order Fulfillment System using Voice Pick

A popular warehouse order picking technology is called voice picking or voice directed picking. We've put together this page on voice picking systems to answer the following common questions about what it is, how it works and it's benefits:

• What is voice directed picking?
• What are the benefits of voice directed picking warehousing systems?
• What are ideal applications for voice picking?
• How does voice directed picking work?
• What is the best voice directed picking technology?

What is Voice Directed Picking/ Voice Picking?

Voice picking or voice directed picking is an order picking technology that has been adopted by many warehouse fulfillment systems. It is an order fulfillment system that helps improve picking productivity and accuracy. By eliminating the need to handle paper, voice picking makes the order fulfillment process more efficient. With paper picking, the pick ticket(s) are in the operator's hand, on a cart, or the forklift and the operator travels through most of the warehouse in search of the general location of the item. Once the pick bay is located, then the actual order picking process begins. However with voice directed picking, you eliminate handling the paper and manually searching for the next location to go to. In other words, operators go "hands free" picking, dramatically increasing picking productivity.

Eliminate Paper Picking Go Hands Free Multilingual

Order pickers are simply directed by voice where to go next. Once they reach the pick bay, the order picker is then directed by voice what to pick.

What are the benefits of voice directed picking?

As mentioned earlier, voice directing picking systems allows you to go “paperless picking”. By eliminating the time consuming and manual labor of having your order pickers read each SKU item to pick line by line and having them travel throughout the entire warehouse for an order, you can greatly improve productivity and accuracy. With a voice directed picking system, orders are downloaded from your existing host or WMS computer and then optimized to reduce labor costs related to paper picking. In short, voice picking order fulfillment systems allows any order fulfillment warehouse operations to:

• Increased picking accuracy
• Increased inventory accuracy
• Increased employee productivity
• Improved safety
• Reduced new worker training time
• Increases job satisfaction for warehouse associates
• Eliminates cost of printing and distributing picking documents
• Growing customer satisfaction

One of the great productivity benefits of voice-based systems is that they allow operators to do two things at once whereas other media used in warehouses such as paper or radio frequency terminals tend to require that you surrender the use of at least one hand or you have to stop and read something before proceeding. This productivity benefit tends to be inversely related to the fraction of an operator's day spent walking.

What are ideal applications for Pick to Voice systems?

Voice directed warehousing systems are best fit for any warehouse order fulfillment operations that does piece picking or broken case picking. These operations typically have a large quantity of SKUs that is running a highly labor intensive order picking operations. If you find that 20% of your products or SKUS require 80% of the picking labor, this type of pick to light system would improve your productivity and even accuracy. Below are some ideal voice picking applications:

• eCommerce & Mail-Order
• Apparel & Footwear
• Automotive Aftermarket Parts
• Food, Beverage & Grocery
• Pharmaceutical
• Health & Beauty
• Reverse Logistics
• Consumer Goods Manufacturing
• Value-Added & Customized Products to Order
• Retail
• Vending

 

How does Voice Directed Picking work?

We won’t go into the technical details of how the system communicates at each level throughout the voice picking order fulfillment process, but we’ll explain the main components involved with a FastFetch voice directed picking warehouse system.  
Step 1: Add the voice directed picking software to your existing WMS or host computer  
Step 2: Add voice directed hardware. With FastFetch a headset is not used, instead a Tablet PC directs pickers where to go.
 Step 3: Get your order pickers acquainted with the new picking system! It will be their new best friend!

What is the best voice directed picking technology on the market?

We've put our FastFetch voice directed picking video next to the typical voice directed picking. See the videos yourself and see how much FASTER FastFetch is compared to the typical voice directed picking systems:

While, we would like to simply say that FastFetch order fulfillment systems is the best voice directed picking system on the market, we’d like to explain why we think it is so. FastFetch is a 3-in-1 directed picking technology that combines voice directed picking, pick to light, and bar code scan picking. In side by side comparisons, it is obvious that:

• FastFetch is 2 to 3 times faster than other voice directed picking technology
• FastFetch batches orders to reduce pick times (whereas typical voice directed picking doesn’t)
• FastFetch downloads “next best order” to replace offloaded order (whereas typical voice directed picking doesn’t)
• FastFetch constantly is optimizing picks to reduce travel distance and increase picking productivity (whereas typical voice directed picking doesn’t)

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