Pick and pack warehousing is warehousing organized around the order rather than the pallet. A storage warehouse is judged on how much it holds and how accurately; a pick and pack warehouse is judged on how many lines it can turn into shipped orders in a shift, at what accuracy and at what cost per order. That changes the layout, the staffing and the numbers on the wall. This page walks the operation as the person running it sees it: the pick path, the pack station, the standard a picker is held to and the weekly figures that say whether the building is earning its rate card. The free labor standard worksheet on this site turns your own lines and hours into the pickers a shift needs.
Layout: fast movers close, the path one way
A pick and pack floor keeps the highest-velocity SKUs nearest the pack bench and the slowest furthest away, and it routes the picker in one direction so a pick list is walked, not wandered. Forward pick locations hold a few days of each fast SKU, replenished from reserve pallets, so a picker never waits for a forklift. The pack bench sits at the end of the path with cartons, dunnage, inserts and the label printer within reach. None of this needs software to design; it needs the velocity of each SKU from last month's orders and a plan that is re-read when the client's range changes.
Staffing: the labor standard is the plan
The question every morning is how many pickers the day's orders need. Answer it from the standard: if the team picks 11 lines an hour on a client's account and today's orders hold 1,320 lines, that is 120 picker hours, or 15 pickers on an eight-hour shift at full utilization, and more once breaks and utilization are honest. The worksheet on this site does that arithmetic from the figures you enter, lines, a standard, a shift length and a utilization, and shows what the day looks like if the standard is missed by a tenth. Pick and pack warehousing without a standard is staffed by feel, and feel is expensive at the end of the month.
Measuring: four figures a week
Lines per labor hour, orders per labor hour, cost per order and pick accuracy. Two of them come from the pick totals against the hours worked; cost per order comes from the loaded labor on the account against the orders it produced; accuracy comes from the checks at the pack bench and the client's short-shipment claims. Read weekly, per client, they say whether the pick path, the standard and the price agree with each other. Pickpathly Pro keeps them week by week so the trend is visible before the client raises it.
Questions people ask about pick and pack warehousing
What is pick and pack in a warehouse?
Picking is pulling the ordered lines from their locations; packing is putting them in the right carton to the client's spec and labeling it. Together they are the per-order work a fulfillment warehouse performs, and the part of the rate card charged per order.
How many lines an hour should a picker pick?
Whatever your own measured standard says for that client's range and layout; this site publishes no industry rate. Measure a week of lines against picker hours per client, set the standard from it, and staff the shift from the standard.
What is the difference between a forward pick and reserve storage?
Forward pick locations hold a small quantity of each fast SKU where the picker walks; reserve storage holds the bulk on pallets elsewhere. Replenishing forward from reserve keeps the pick path short and the forklifts out of it.