Order picker accuracy is one of the most controllable drivers of warehouse performance, yet it’s often treated as a static skill rather than a process that can be improved. Leading operations recognize that sustained accuracy requires ongoing refinement, not one-time fixes.
Accurate order picking reduces errors, accelerates fulfillment, and improves customer satisfaction for modern warehouse operations. Operators need reliable personnel who can provide accurate fulfillment processes amid rising labor costs.
However, hiring the right people is not a one-time fix for mis-picks and slow fulfillment. Top-performing warehouses adopt and maintain a culture of continuous improvement while combining training, technology, and process audits to improve accuracy over the long term.
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Learn how modern warehouse operations can build a culture of continuous improvement, the factors required to increase long-term picking accuracy, and strategies for creating more reliable supply chains.
What is Accurate Order Picking?
In warehouse fulfillment, order picking involves retrieving products from inventory based on orders, checking the accuracy of the quantities and SKUs, scanning items into and out of inventory, and moving items to the staging area. In many cases, order pickers use picking strategies to increase their efficiency and accuracy.
Order picking can involve significant use of heavy machinery and inventory management technology. Most warehouses expend significant operating costs on hiring, training, and retaining pickers to prevent delays, returns, and customer satisfaction issues in their fulfillment process.
How to Improve Order Picking Accuracy
Maintaining high picking accuracy over time requires strategies for continuous improvement, engagement, and monitoring. Workflow improvements should be incremental, rather than one-size-fits-all changes to the fulfillment process. These actionable steps can help operators and managers improve their process:
Increase Employee Engagement
Gallup polls show that employee engagement has reached a 10-year low of 31%, which means that more than 2 in 3 employees are disengaged at work. Only 46% of employees report clearly knowing the expectations for their work.
In other words, employees lack satisfaction, direction, skill growth, and loyalty. Fulfillment operations need engaged employees to retain skilled workers, certify order pickers for machine and inventory operations at their sites, and build an environment of continuous improvement.
Improvement Method: Introduce clearer paths to certification, career growth, and skill increases. Polls show that employees stay with companies that help them improve their skills and advance their careers, yet just 26% of employees strongly agree that their current job provides these opportunities.
Set Up Continuous Monitoring Practices
Improving pick accuracy cannot be achieved overnight. Each fulfillment operation can improve its process by gradually increasing visibility and reducing errors along its supply chain. This requires consistent monitoring, which may include warehouse management tools and other methods of KPI monitoring.
Improvement Method: Prioritize KPIs such as order fulfillment time, picking error rate, returns volume, customer satisfaction indicators, pick rate per unit of time, scan rate.
Strategize for a Balance of Accuracy and Speed
Successful fulfillment operations know that high customer satisfaction relies on a balance of accuracy and speed. They address this balance by deploying different picking methods depending on their layout and product organization.
- Manual Picking: Selecting each SKU individually
- Batch Picking: Getting all items for several orders at the same time
- Zone Picking: Assigning each picker a storage zone from wich they pick their items
- Wave Picking: Prioritizing certain products based on deadlines or demand
Each strategy has specific advantages and drawbacks.
- Batch picking lowers travel time for order pickers from staging and inventory areas, but may not be feasible in larger warehouses or those with a small number of large items.
- By contrast, zone picking may be useful for large fulfillment facilities, especially if diverse product categories can be easily separated between zones.
Empower Workers With Additional Training
By expanding employee training practices beyond onboarding, distributors can adapt to the needs of their workers and workflows. This includes examining how order picking accuracy and speed change with fluctuations in demand, inventory, and worker skills. Introducing new system updates, scanning processes, SKUs, or equipment are other reasons to provide new or refresher training courses to get ahead of preventable issues with worker experience.
Improvement Method: Cross-train order pickers across warehouse zones or with different picking methods to increase their flexibility and lower error rates. During peak demand seasons, supplement with expert workforce solutions when new workflows are often required to meet demand.
Recruit Rapid-Response Warehouse Teams to Improve Fulfillment
In warehouse fulfillment, accuracy directly impacts customer satisfaction. Sustaining accurate order picking cannot happen in a single sweeping change. Instead, incremental strategic changes will drive long-term gains in accuracy by encouraging engagement and refined fulfillment processes.
At NVT Staffing, we provide rapid-response workforce solutions for warehouses, distributors, and chains. This includes on-call order pickers with the skills you need to support your operations in the short term while improving them in the long term with training, engagement, and monitoring processes. Our teams can be deployed within 72 hours and don’t require a long-term work contract, so you’ll never have to pay for idle labor in your off-season.
Contact our team of warehouse staffing professionals and schedule a consultation to support your staff with experienced pickers and other fulfillment roles in as little as 72 hours.