3 Tips for Designing Your Own Packing Station Flow

3 Tips for Designing Your Own Packing Station Flow

Do you know the 3 key factors to setting up an optimized packing station? Discover the best way to set up pack stations in your warehouse and how it can help improve your team’s efficiency!

Video Transcript

Hello. I’m Aaron Rubin, the CEO of ShipHero. I’m at one of our facilities. I want to show you a typical way to set up your packing station and what that process should look like. So your objectives are, first of all, you want to minimize touches, so you want to touch everything once. You never want to go backwards, so you want a flow that always moves in one direction. It never requires you to change directions. You want to not use your keyboard and definitely not use your mouse. So those things will all go slow. So, I’ll show you how we do it at ShipHero but those are the basic principles to build your own flow. So we start with totes. Totes have barcodes. You scan the barcode which pulls up the order.

You then scan the items, you put them on the scale. You then choose your correct packaging material. These buttons actually tell our system which was selected, put the items in the packaging material. If it’s a box, we use this to get the wet tape, seal the package. The invoice is printed by pressing this button here so we don’t use a keyboard, we don’t use a mouse.

We just use this big button that says invoice and label that prints a label from here. You slap that label on. You typically throw it on a conveyor here. The way this is set up, we’ve got these bins at the station, so you throw it in the bin. If you need void fill that’s available right here. There’s a foot pedal, so you’re completely hands free and you’ll notice the flow goes uninterrupted from grabbing the tote until here.

When you’re done packing it, you’re done with the order. The tote goes back, you grab the next one, repeat the process. That’s it. That’s the simple philosophy when you’re designing your pack stations: one touch, keep one direction throughout the flow, don’t move backwards, don’t use the keyboard, don’t use your mouse. Just keep those points in mind.

ShipHero Case Study: Vareya

ShipHero Case Study: Vareya

VareYa Tripled Their Business With ShipHero.

Located in the Netherlands, VareYa began providing 3PL services for B2B companies across Europe, Asia and the UK in 2008. With just 30 full-time employees, and looking to switch to a B2C business in 2016, VareYa knew that their current, disorganized warehouse management solution wouldn’t allow them the growth they wanted. All of these non-integrated systems led to a ton of paperwork, a ton of mistakes and a ton of headaches.

Enter ShipHero. With its fully end-to-end Warehouse Management Software solution, ShipHero was able to migrate all of VareYa’s systems to an all-in-one platform. Instead of using a variety of different software, VareYa could now just look to ShipHero to run its warehouses.

Video Transcript

ShipHero was a lifesaver. It was three years ago that we decided to find a new system. So, I had a list of requirements and it was like, check, check, check, check. And the support was very great from the beginning. When we onboard the client, the connecting with the store is like plug and play. Even the client can do it in like 5 minutes and before it took days to get connected.

You can just create the automation rule very easy. It’s very user friendly. Everything that we needed was integrated. So it was like a system that was built for us. Since we used ShipHero, we tripled. So all our clients love it because they are able to to have an account and they can also create all their accounts for their for their teams.

And that is something they really like. And I know for sure that for a lot of clients, it was the reason to start doing business with us. What’s helped us a lot is that we have the reports in ShipHero and we communicate these reports to our clients and they really appreciate it. I know for sure that that ShipHero has helped us a lot to grow.

I’m really happy with the support every day. It’s really positive. Also, if we need new features, they put it on the feature list. Actually, I don’t have any negative points.

Understanding Efficient Warehouse Replenishment

Understanding Efficient Warehouse Replenishment

Follow Aaron through our PA warehouse as he explains what replenishment is and the tools you need to do it better and faster.

Video Transcript

Hello, I’m Aaron Rubin, CEO of ShipHero. I’m at one of our owned facilities and I want to explain what replenishment is and what your typical process will be of doing it. So if you look out here, you’ll see a typical picking area where you have lots of small boxes, each of which have different products, which is the ideal way to pick.

But if you look on this side. You’ll see we have pallets which have many, many boxes of the exact same product. Now, why don’t you just pick from a pallet? And it’s like if you replace each of those little boxes with the pallet it originally came on. There would not be enough room in the warehouse and you would also end up walking for mile because would just take up so much more space.

So when stock comes in, oftentimes you get a pallet worth of the goods, you need to store that pallet. But then you only want to be able to pick out of a single box of it.

So replenishment is the process of moving one or a few boxes out of a pallet and putting it into the pickable area.

If you have a really fast mover where you’re picking from the pallet, you still end up replenishing because what often happens is…With a SKU, with that velocity, you have a full container of a SKU. So, you’ll have 24 pallets, let’s say, of the single SKU. So you still need to keep most of it up in the air and on racks. And then one pallet at a time to be pickable. So you replenish that.

So, in our software it tells you what products need to be replenished. So, I’m not going to go into too much detail on that, but I’ll show you the physical process of how we do it.

When you’re replenishing from your pallet positions, if it’s on the floor loaded position.

It’s pretty easy to just grab a box. If it’s higher up, you can do things like a rolling ladder, but typically what you’re doing is you’re grabbing a forklift, pulling down a full pallet, taking out the box or two that you need.

Then, putting the pallet back up into that original position.

An ePicker makes it a lot easier where you can go up, remove the box or two that you need, drive it to where it needs to go without having to pull the full pallet down and put it back.

So, it’ll take about half the time. And ePickers are generally cheaper and easier to operate than a forklift. So if you have the need to do a lot of replenishment, making an investment in an ePicker will often be a smart idea.

Users, Roles & Permissions

Users, Roles & Permissions

ShipHero is upgrading the users page and introducing more advanced user permissions. The new Users & Roles page gives you the option to assign predefined “roles” to each user to grant them specific permissions.

An Overview of ShipHero’s Powerful Warehouse Management System

An Overview of ShipHero’s Powerful Warehouse Management System

Do you ever wonder how it all works? Warehouse Management Software is a three-word term for making it easier for eCommerce brands to manage their warehouses and ship to their customers. Check out how ShipHero does it with this quick breakdown of our legacy WMS.