Walking is where picking time disappears. When a picker crosses the warehouse for every order line, more of the shift goes to moving than to picking, and the gap grows with every new product and every peak season. Three methods do most of the work to shrink it: zone picking, batch picking and route optimization. You can start with any of them, with or without a WMS.
A picking route is the path a picker walks to collect the items on a pick list, from the first location to the packing station. Two things decide its length: which orders are picked together, and the order the lines appear on the list. Change either one and the walk changes. The three methods below work on one or both.
With zone picking, you split the warehouse into areas and each picker stays in one. Orders pass from zone to zone, or each zone picks its part and the parts meet at packing.
It works best in larger warehouses with many SKUs and steady volume. Pickers stop crisscrossing the building, there’s less congestion in the busy aisles, and people get faster because they learn their shelves by heart.
The trade-off is coordination. Orders that touch several zones need to be handed over or consolidated, and an unbalanced zone turns into a bottleneck quickly.
Quick win: watch where pickers queue or wait for each other. Those spots usually show where your zone borders should go.
Batch picking means collecting several orders in one pick run, usually on a trolley with a bin or box per order. Instead of ten walks for ten orders, you make one.
It pays off most when you have many small orders that share locations, which is typical in e-commerce. Tammer Brands, a family-owned wholesale company in Finland, went from picking one order at a time to picking up to 24 orders in a single run.
“Before, we could only pick one order at a time. Now, we can pick up to 24 orders.”
Joni Viikki, Logistics Manager, Tammer Brands
The risk is putting an item in the wrong box. Scanning each item into its box prevents that, so the speed doesn’t cost you accuracy.
Quick win: pull a day of orders and count how many share their top five locations. If it’s a large share, batching is the place to start.
Even a well-batched pick run wastes steps if the list sends the picker back and forth. Route optimization puts the pick lines in the order that matches how the warehouse is physically laid out.
Which strategy works best depends on your layout and order profile. Whichever you use, the system needs to know how your warehouse is built: the aisle sequence, the direction pickers walk, and where a pick run starts and ends. Without that, “optimized” just means sorted by location number.
The three methods stack. Zones shorten the area each picker covers, batching cuts the number of walks, and route optimization shortens each walk.
Bitlog WMS has a Picking Route Optimization license for trolley batch picking. When a picker starts a trolley, Bitlog does three things:
The route follows your real layout. If your aisle names don't match the order people actually walk, you can set the walking order on each bin with Route Aisle and Route Rack, without renaming anything. Bitlog also measures walking distance per pick, so you can compare before and after you switch it on.
The license includes the Warehouse Map, a live view of the floor in the web portal. It shows every trolley and its status, highlights busy aisles on a heat map, and lets you walk any route in 3D. That last one is handy for training new staff, too.
Zones and batches are covered as well. In the mobile app, batch picking shows which box each item went into. For zones, Relay Picking moves one order through several areas, such as manual zones and AutoStore.
You can get a long way with planning and discipline. Here’s where to start:
A heads-up: doing this by hand takes more time than most teams expect, and the layout needs updating every time your product range changes. It’s still worth it, and it makes the move to a WMS easier when you get there.
What is the best picking route strategy?
There isn’t one that fits every warehouse. S-shape is easy to learn and works well with many picks per aisle. Largest gap usually saves more steps when picks are spread thin. Test against your own order data.
How much walking can route optimization save?
It depends on your layout and order profile. That’s why it pays to measure walking distance before you change anything, so you can compare afterward.
Does route optimization work with every picking method?
Not always. In Bitlog WMS, Picking Route Optimization is built for trolley batch picking, where choosing which orders go on the trolley together makes the biggest difference.
Should I use zone picking or batch picking?
Often both. Batch within zones when you have many small orders in a large warehouse. If congestion is the problem, start with zones. If you have lots of small orders, start with batching.
Do I need a WMS to optimize picking routes?
No, but it helps. Manual methods work well at low volume. As SKUs and orders grow, keeping routes efficient by hand gets hard.
Shorter walks mean more lines picked per hour without adding people. Want to see how Picking Route Optimization and the Warehouse Map would work in your warehouse? Book a demo here