Waveless Picking

As the name suggests, this is a way of releasing picks to the floor without a wave management process. However, in limited capability WMS solutions, orders can only really be released in the sequence they are received. Today, however, the term “waveless picking” more commonly applies to a more advanced approach to piece picking in which picks are dynamically assigned to a picker based on many variables, such as pick location, order priority, opportunities to minimize travel distance and more.

As just one example, a worker using a pick cart might have the picks to that cart dynamically assigned to the cart in real-time when the associate first scans the cart barcode. Later, a pick originally planned for that cart might by dynamically replaced with a newly received and higher priority order – a change that appears seamless to the operator. These processes are not available in a wave-based system. Note that in advanced WMS solutions, wave-based and waveless processes can operate in tandem.