Here’s a closer look at pick by light, its potential pitfalls when deployed in today’s dynamic warehouse environment, and how the TeamViewer Frontline Pick solution can offer a more versatile option for optimizing your picking processes.
Pick by light (also known as pick to light) is a light display-based order-picking system. It’s used most often for split-case picking in retail warehouses, third-party distribution centers, and similar environments.
It’s sometimes used in manufacturing, assembly, and kitting scenarios, but once you move beyond simple picking tasks, its limitations become very obvious.
Once the order is scanned, each relevant shelf or basket is illuminated. It’s simply a case of going directly to the lit-up shelf, picking the right quantity of items (also indicated at shelf level), hitting the confirm button, and repeating until the order is complete.
Gone are the paper pick sheets and error-prone list-checking elements traditionally associated with picking. Instead, pick by light seeks to deliver a fast, accurate, and easy-to-learn workflow.
Put to light uses the same display units and infrastructure as pick to light, but it’s for inventory restocking rather than order picking.
With put to light, a worker on replenishment duties follows a workflow similar to a picker: guided by the lights, and moving from bin to bin to deposit items in the relevant baskets.
The limitations of pick by light—especially its relative inflexibility, and reliance on shelf-level installations should not be overlooked. A new breed of vision-picking technology may provide operations managers with a better fit for their needs, offering a less hardware-reliant, easier-to-use, and scalable pick by light alternative.
A customer order is received in the WMS (warehouse management system). The WMS releases the order to the pick by light system, specifying the items needed for order fulfillment.
The pick by light system identifies the specific storage locations for the required items.
A worker commences a picking workflow via the warehouse workstation. Each shelf or storage bin has a light module above it. When the pick commences, the lights above each relevant bin illuminate. Next to this light, an additional illuminated display indicates the number of items to be picked from each bin.
Guided by the lights, the worker moves from bin to bin, picking the number of items indicated and hitting the confirm button on each bin, which turns the light off.
Once all items are covered, a further bay display unit will flag up ‘order complete’.
The worker passes the order tote over to dispatch or transfers it to another worker if items are required from a different zone to finalize the order.
In situations like this, pick by light can make inventory scale-up harder to deal with. It’s not just a case of adding more stacks to your shelves. There’s the upfront cost of possibly thousands of extra light modules, along with potential delays in procuring them. With more modules comes a higher likelihood of component failure and higher maintenance costs. If the existing system and its underlying software are already close to capacity, it may also mean having to upgrade your license.
That’s a lot to think about, and in some cases, these scalability limitations could even cause you to conclude that some ‘SKU-heavy’ contracts are just not feasible: a potentially significant lost opportunity cost.
But let’s say you want to move away from a zonal system to something more fluid with overlapping operating areas. Worse case could be that the pick by light system prevents you from implementing the workflows that will work best for your business.
Some light modules have a display that provides a couple of lines of additional information. But that’s about it. If workers need more detailed guidance, pick by light too often leaves them in the dark. In contrast, TeamViewer Frontline Pick can place a much more useful information stack in the view of individual workers, including step-by-step assembly support.
frontline pick
Frontline Pick is an augmented reality solution by TeamViewer explicitly designed for vision picking tasks.
The solution enhances the best elements of pick by light—speed, accuracy, and hands-free operation—to help support a wider range of picking and pre-fulfillment assembly tasks, bringing them up to date. Frontline Pick means there’s no need for a vast fleet of shelf-level light modules. Using smart glasses or your wearable of choice, it shows a worker everything they need to know about an order right in front of their eyes.
Don’t want the cost and hassle of thousands of light displays? With Frontline Pick, you don’t need them. In terms of hardware, all you need are smart glasses (or your wearable of choice) for each worker. Order-specific instructions — exactly where to go and what to do—are delivered directly in their field of vision. The cost of shelf-based light modules, adjustments to racking, cabling, and associated maintenance is eliminated.
Frontline Pick places personalized instructions—specific to each order—directly in each worker’s field of vision. They can move from shelf to shelf and, crucially, from zone to zone, following the guidance they are fed. This eliminates the confusion with pick by light if multiple workers are in the same proximity. You can rapidly adopt whatever picking system works best for your business or for particular contracts—e.g., cluster, wave, batch, or zonal—without being held back by your technical infrastructure.
Light-based picking systems are more accurate than paper lists, but they are far from error-proof. Without additional safeguards, workers can easily misinterpret a light signal or accidentally pick from an adjacent bin. With Frontline Pick, you can configure the system to place a wider range of useful information in a worker’s view, including item photos, text, and optimized routing paths. You are better equipped to maximize accuracy and aim for a 100% perfect order rate. In addition, an intuitive confirmation process is integrated into workflows.
Workers can confirm their actions via scan or voice command, receiving clear sound or haptic feedback for errors. Additionally, the system prevents progression to the next pick until the correct item or location is confirmed, significantly enhancing overall accuracy and minimizing mistakes.
Through the power of AR, TeamViewer Frontline Pick enhances not just basic picking workflows but also a wider range of complex kitting and assembly processes required in manufacturing and retail fulfillment. Superimposed step-by-step guidance, images, kitting rack visualization, and voice prompts delivered via smart glasses remove the need for paper-based assembly instructions, enabling hands-free task completion while helping to eliminate sequencing and other errors.
A light signal can only tell you so much on its own. Frontline Pick empowers you to provide workers with a much richer stream of accurate, hyper-relevant information right at the point of need. If they need additional guidance, workers can initiate live video or audio calls with team leads or remote support directly through their smart glasses or other devices. The result? A shorter learning curve for new starters and the chance to reach maximum productivity much quicker.
From Coca-Cola HBC to DHL, TeamViewer Frontline Frontline Pick is already being successfully used by some of the world’s biggest names in retail, logistics, and manufacturing.
Frontline Pick can help you easily scale operations, regardless of your future retail strategy. With the introduction of new product ranges or new order types (e-commerce or buy-online-pickup-in-store), Frontline Pick means you can rapidly reconfigure your workflows without being tied to the complex hardware installation processes associated with pick by light and roll them out rapidly to each branch.
Logistics companies can quickly deploy and scale Frontline Pick across all warehouses and fulfillment hubs without needing fixed light installations at each location. You can update or change workflows on the fly, adapting to the changing needs of your partners, and giving you greater scope to take on contracts that may not have been feasible when using pick by light alone.
Pick by light can only show workers which components they need. If you need to show them how to put it all together, a pick by light system tends to leave you and your workers wanting much, much more. With Frontline Pick and the wider Frontline solution, you can finally create the holistic digital framework you need to deliver world-class support to your employees. Step-by-step, hands-free guidance, audio prompts, video, and real-time assistance on call can help you maximize productivity and ensure quality control.
A pick to light system generally does what it sets out to do pretty well, but it’s never 100% accurate. For instance, especially in a busy warehouse, retail, or manufacturing environment with lots of distinct inventory items, there’s the constant risk of workers misreading the lights. Examples include picking the wrong item when lots of bins are packed close together or taking the wrong quantity of units.
Under a pick to light system, each inventory bin, basket, or shelf is assigned its light module. When an order is allocated to a picker, the lights associated with each order item automatically illuminate. It means the picker can see exactly where to go to retrieve the order items. The module also has a quantity display. Workers move from bin to bin, picking the number of items indicated and hitting the confirm button on each module, which turns the light off.
What makes the perfect picking system? Most logistics operations managers would include a 100% perfect order rate and an equally stellar customer satisfaction score at the top of their wish list. Speed, accuracy, cost-effectiveness, and scalability are must-have attributes to get there.
The best picking system goes far beyond basic flashing light indicators to meet the needs of today’s retailers, distributors, and manufacturers. TeamViewer Frontline Pick uses award-winning AR technology to deliver personalized, granular information.
With Frontline Pick, you can deliver easy-to-follow, contextual guidance specific to every order directly into each worker’s field of view. This is achieved without having to install display modules across your premises.
Light indicators are extremely limited in the information they can provide to employees. In contrast, Frontline Pick empowers you to create fully customized task instructions, incorporating your desired choices from a wide range of digital elements (images, text, audio, video, and annotations) as a precise match for your workflows.
Installing or making changes to a pick by light system can involve a significant and time-consuming infrastructure overhaul. Without needing shelf-level equipment installation and with pre-configured modules for common picking tasks, Frontline Pick can be deployed quickly in active production environments, allowing you to get it operational without disruption.
For employees on the floor and managers alike, Frontline delivers a straightforward, simple-to-navigate interface that instantly becomes second nature. Pickers get the right information at the right time for speedy, error-free task completion. Meanwhile, managers can keep an overview of task progress, manage devices, and troubleshoot from afar.