Warehouse Picking Carts: Essential Tools for Efficient Order Fulfillment
Picking carts are used in order fulfillment centers by warehouse employees who pick products from shelves to complete customer orders. With today’s constantly changing markets and the need to react to ever-changing customer preferences, a modular, scalable, and easily modified picking cart is best – one that can quickly adjust to changing order sizes, volumes, and requirements.
Efficient order fulfillment with a picking cart is a question of flexibility, availability, and cost control. Fixed or welded picking carts are expensive ($700 to $900). Modifying or changing the structure of a welded picking cart involves sending welded picking carts to the manufacturer or a third-party contractor for refurbishment, waiting days or weeks, and incurring significant rework costs that are often higher than the cart’s original sticker price.
This is why today’s lean order fulfillment environments have embraced the modularity and scalability of steel tube and joint picking carts and material handling structures. Far less expensive upfront ($250 to $300), steel tube and joint picking carts can easily be modified or adjusted onsite within the warehouse – sometimes within mere minutes – saving warehouse operations considerable time, resources, and money while ensuring optimal material handling efficiency.
Understanding Picking Carts
An all-too-common mistake is assuming that all mobile carts are the same and serve the same purpose. They don’t. Kitting carts transport a “kit” or “package” of materials, parts, and components to production so employees can assemble a product. WIP “work-in-process” carts transport semi-finished products to different production workstations. Truck carts hold finished products for packaging or storage, and tugger carts move packaged goods, materials, and finished products to different warehouse locations.
A picking cart serves none of these purposes. Picking carts simplifies order fulfillment. Steel tubes and joint picking carts can be assembled within the warehouse. They can be made to include multiple levels and numerous customized bin locations. A modular, scalable picking cart made of steel tubes and joints means warehouse and order fulfillment centers can easily modify their picking carts to account for new products and changing customer orders.
Warehouse employees use picking carts to pick various products and accessories from warehouse shelves. By identifying specific bin locations via a pick list or order fulfillment sheet, warehouse employees can move from one stock, storage, and racking area of the warehouse to the next, picking various products and accessories and placing them on the picking cart until an order is complete.
The above image is a perfect example of the customization that can be accomplished with steel tubes and joint picking carts. This warehouse picking cart has casters at the bottom with foot brakes, ensuring that warehouse employees can apply the brake to keep the picking cart stationary. The customized configuration includes two columns with eleven placement areas for sheet placements along with three customized bin locations on the far right and a flat-level storage area at the top.
Benefits of Using Picking Carts
Modular and scalable steel tube and joint picking carts are the ultimate in warehouse order fulfillment efficiency. They can be configured to act as a fail-safe, Poka-Yoke solution that dramatically reduces picking errors by ensuring only the right-sized products, accessories and add-ons fit into bins. They can be configured alongside Warehouse Management Systems (WMS) to include RFID barcode scanners to improve inventory counting and accuracy.
Modular and scalable steel tubes and joint picking carts can be assembled to maximize available space between adjacent storage, shelving, and industrial racking structures. This provides warehouse employees with sufficient space on either side of the picking cart, allowing them to pick various items without interference or having to constantly walk around the picking cart.
An all-too-common occurrence for warehouses with fixed industrial storage racking is to purchase a welded picking cart whose dimensions are too wide, making picking various items for order fulfillment time-consuming, dangerous, and cumbersome.
With steel tubes and joint picking carts, the emphasis is on modularity and scalability, creating a tailor-made picking cart whose dimensions and bin storage areas are customized to your needs.
Warehouses can also customize their steel tube and joint picking carts for single-pass order fulfillment, helping to reduce multiple trips to and from storage, packaging, and shipping.
With conventional welded picking carts, there is an inherent limitation in how many products can be picked and placed onto the cart. That means wasted time spent picking parts and transporting them to packaging and shipping on multiple passes. Multiple trips due to storage limitations of welded carts have a direct impact on warehouse costs and efficiency.
With steel tubes and joint picking carts, all that movement waste is eliminated. Assembling a cart that allows for single-pass order fulfillment increases efficiencies and reduces costs.
With steel tubes and joint picking carts, flexibility, cost, ergonomics, safety, and functionality are always front and center.
Drawbacks of Welded, Fixed Picking Carts
With expensive conventional welded picking carts, there is no flexibility. These fixed, welded picking carts cannot be changed or modified without incurring significant rework costs and downtime. Welded carts are not customized to a warehouse’s specific bin sizes or product dimensions. Having a “customized” welded cart serves no purpose as these always include high non-recurring engineering (NRE) design and assembly costs.
Most often, welded picking carts have a maximum of two to three levels with no spacing on any level to account for different warehouse bins, boxes, products, or part sizes. Welded carts are generalized stand-alone designs. They’re manufactured as standard product offerings, forcing warehouses to change their material handling, picking, and order fulfillment processes to accommodate the limited functionality of the welded carts.
Additional issues with welded carts include a lack of warehouse employee ergonomics and safety. In terms of order fulfillment, products are allowed to move freely on welded carts, often falling off and causing accidents, trips, slips, falls, or extensive product damage. In the worst cases, a flatbed cart with no means of safely securing finished goods means the warehouse employees moving the cart and anyone around are susceptible to accidents and injuries.
With their limited functionality and flexibility, incredibly high costs, ergonomic and safety issues coupled with the constant potential for increased product damage and order fulfillment errors, welded carts should be avoided entirely.
Picking Cart Design Principles
The first and most important part of designing any modular, scalable steel tube and joint picking cart for order fulfillment is to account for the picking cart’s loading capacity. This ensures the picking cart can sufficiently support whatever weight it holds while ensuring warehouse employees can easily maneuver the picking cart without over-exerting or injuring themselves.
While safety and ergonomics should always be a priority, another is ensuring you’ve designed a steel tube and joint picking cart that is customized for your product’s dimensions and bin sizes. Simple solutions like kaizen foam can protect fragile finished products from damage. Incorporating ergonomic solutions like casters with foot brakes helps to keep picking carts stationary, helping to avoid roll-back accidents.
Creating structural reinforcements with extra steel tubes and durable steel corner, 4-way, 3-way, and angled cross joints to support each level of the picking cart is another important design element. Given the low cost per foot of steel tubes, adding a single three-foot steel support angle with two joints typically costs less than $10 – making reinforcements affordable, simple, and quick.
Finally, using heavy-duty, high-strength 1 & 9/16′ square steel tubes for the base of picking carts creates a solid foundation for the entire structure where weight distribution is always optimized for safety.
With modular and scalable steel tube and joint picking carts, warehouses can future-proof their order fulfillment processes by ensuring their picking carts can easily be adjusted or modified. Few material handling systems can match steel tubes and joints in terms of low cost, flexibility, functionality, durability, strength, safety, ergonomics, and order fulfillment efficiency.
Examples of Picking Carts in Action
This image is a perfect example of how a steel tube and joint picking cart can be designed, assembled, and optimized for single-pass order fulfillment. Instead of using a standard welded cart where products would be allowed to move freely and become damaged, this cart above has specific bin locations along with casters with brakes to allow warehouse employees to keep the picking cart stationary.
This warehouse picking cart is a perfect example of how warehouses can customize their picking cart designs to match their product dimensions or bin sizes. In this example, a warehouse created a picking cart for order fulfillment where they created customized slots on two levels to accommodate multiple combined rolls of tape.
By customizing the picking cart, the warehouse employees will be able to safely secure the parts for the order and do one complete single-pass order fulfillment run.
This picking cart was specifically designed as a narrow-aisle picking cart for a warehouse with tight spacing between its existing industrial racking and shelving. Instead of buying an expensive welded pushcart that would be too wide to work with – this warehouse chose to make multiple customized, narrow-aisle steel tube and joint picking carts that have the perfect dimensions to fit between the warehouse’s industrial racking.
The benefit of the steel tube and joint system is that if the warehouse ever expands or increases the space between their industrial racking, they can easily modify or change their order fulfillment picking carts in a fraction of the time and costs compared to changing welded picking carts.
What to Include in Your Picking Cart
All steel tube and joint picking carts for order fulfillment will of course always include the steel pipes and joints to connect the pipes. These steel pipes are cold-drawn steel which means they have undergone temperature treatment to increase their impact resistance, durability, and strength.
While it is very possible to make a warehouse order fulfillment picking cart with just steel pipes and joints, most warehouses choose to increase flexibility with additional accessories. For instance, kaizen foam can be used to cut out the outline of a given product to ensure it is properly protected against damage. Rollers can be used on multilevel picking carts to store multiple orders and have them easily removed when ready.
Decking materials can be used to make pull-out drawers or containment levels and separations for different-sized bins. Ultimately, there are endless possibilities in design to account for everything required in order fulfillment. From creating separate bin locations, product holders, packaging tools, tape, and consumables to ensuring that the cart has foot brakes that can be applied to keep the cart stationary, everything you envision your picking cart becoming can be done with the steel tube and joint system.
FAQs
How do you determine a warehouse picking cart’s loading capacity?
At Flexpipe, we provide our customers with a loading capacity tool where they can input the length of a given pipe, and the tool will determine the loading capacity. Ultimately, the steel tube and joint system is modular and scalable. Supporting material handling structures like picking carts for order fulfillment is easy and inexpensive. If a given level determines a specific load capacity, multiple pipes and joints can be used to further support the structure.
Who designs a Flexpipe picking cart or other material handling structure?
Customers have the option of having the Flexpipe fabrication team design their warehouse order fulfillment picking cart or they can design it themselves. Flexpipe can pre-cut everything so that everything arrives ready to be assembled.
For companies who want to design their structures, Flexpipe provides a free SketchUp downloadable plugin. Designs can be optimized from this plugin and once completed, customers can order their parts and materials list directly from their laptops.
Is it easy to assemble, modify, or change a steel tube and joint picking cart?
Yes. In many ways, Flexpipe is like Lego for adults. While on-site training can be provided by Flexpipe, it doesn’t take long for customers to catch on to the simplicity of the Flexpipe system. Assembly times depend entirely on the type of material handling structure being assembled.
In terms of making modifications to your Flexpipe picking carts, they can take anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes while expanding the width or increasing the height can take an hour or more – depending upon what needs to be changed. However, all these changes can be done by your warehouse team.
Flexpipe even provides customers with the Flexpipe Crib – complete with parts, joints, accessories, add-ons, and piping solutions with placement for table saw, an extensive fixture of bins for consumables and tools, and two tool-placement boards.
Visit our Youtube channel to learn more about FLEXPIPE CRIB – A Lean Storage Unit for Tools and Components
Are there any specialized tools needed to cut the steel pipes?
A table saw, bandsaw, or handheld “handsaws” are all great tools to use for cutting pipe. These tools are most often already found within today’s warehouses.
What kind of material handling structures can you make with Flexpipe?
Every conceivable material handling structure can be made with Flexpipe. Takt boards, rotating cubes, 8-face boards, shelving, racking, flow racks, push carts, mobile carts, tug carts, WIP carts, picking carts, packaging carts and an entire range of workstations and workbenches can be made with Flexpipe.
To learn more about the many different possibilities Flexpipe offers, visit Flexpipe Structures.
Which industries use Flexpipe?
Everything from warehousing, third-party logistics companies, aerospace, automotive, electronics, corrugated packaging, hydraulics, and numerous industrial, commercial, and consumer industries use Flexpipe.
Any lean manufacturing, continuous improvement, or lean thinking order fulfillment center, warehouse, manufacturer, or other company that must handle, store, retrieve and ship materials and products can benefit from Flexpipe.
Flexpipe: The Ultimate Picking Cart Solution
Flexpipe is the ultimate modular and scalable material handling solution, putting the power of customization right in your hands. From easy-to-use picking carts that store large volume orders and allow order fulfillment to be completed in a single pass to manufacturing facilities that want to adopt lean manufacturing best practices – Flexpipe is the best available solution.
If you would like to learn more about the many different types of companies that have used Flexpipe, please visit Case Studies.
To learn about how Flexpipe helps those in third-party logistics, warehouse, and order fulfillment, please visit Warehousing.
To reach out to us and speak to someone or get additional information on Flexpipe in terms of samples, starter kits, and pricing, contact us now.
