Pick-to-Light
Pick-to-Light is a paperless order-picking system that uses light displays mounted at storage locations to guide operators to the right items and quantities. When an order is being picked, lights illuminate at the locations to pick from, showing the quantity on a digital display; the picker takes the items and presses a button to confirm, and the next lights guide them on. A related method, put-to-light, uses the same principle to guide the sorting/putting of items into orders (as in a put-wall).
By replacing paper pick lists and searching with clear visual cues, pick-to-light delivers high picking speed and accuracy with easy training, and is well suited to high-volume picking of many SKUs from a fixed area, and to order consolidation. It is often combined with goods-to-person stations and voice picking in modern fulfilment. The trade-offs are the fixed installation and cost. Pick-to-light is a widely used warehouse technology that boosts the productivity and accuracy of manual picking, coordinated by the warehouse management/control systems.
Paper pick lists are slow and error-prone; pick-to-light replaces them with unmistakable visual cues that speed picking and slash mistakes while being easy to learn. For high-volume, many-SKU picking it is a proven productivity boost, and paired with goods-to-person and voice it is a staple of modern fulfilment operations.
How does pick-to-light work?
Lights illuminate at the locations to pick from, showing quantities on a display; the picker takes the items and confirms with a button press.
What is put-to-light?
The same light-directed principle used to guide sorting items into orders, such as at a put-wall.