Glossary Discription

Person-to-goods is a warehouse order picking methodology where human pickers travel through the warehouse to retrieve items from their storage locations, representing the traditional and still most common approach to order fulfillment in distribution centers. In this system, pickers receive pick lists or digital instructions directing them to specific aisles, bays, and shelf levels where they manually select the required quantities of each item and place them into carts, totes, or pallets for order consolidation. The person-to-goods approach offers maximum flexibility to accommodate diverse product ranges, varying order profiles, and dynamic inventory locations without requiring substantial automation infrastructure investment. However, this method involves significant non-value-added travel time as pickers may walk several miles per shift navigating warehouse aisles, which reduces overall productivity compared to automated or goods-to-person systems. Optimization strategies for person-to-goods operations include zone picking where the warehouse is divided into areas with dedicated pickers, batch picking where multiple orders are picked simultaneously, wave picking coordinating pick releases, and optimized slotting placing fast-moving items in easily accessible locations.

Characteristics:

• Pickers travel to storage locations
• Traditional and most common picking method
• Maximum flexibility for diverse product ranges
• Significant picker travel time required
• Enhanced through zone, batch, or wave picking strategies