Measuring picker travel with a stopwatch and a floor plan

Picker travel is visible without a new warehouse computer. You need a floor plan you can write on, a watch, and permission to walk behind a picker without turning the exercise into a performance review. We mark start of wave, each aisle entry, each wait at an intersection, and the time the last line is confirmed.

The useful output is not an average seconds-per-line. Averages hide the intersection that sixteen totes cross because cosmetics and pharmacy were slotted at opposite ends “to keep families together.” Family grouping is a merchandising idea. Travel is a floor idea. They only coincide when the families that share a tote also share an aisle.

On a contract packing site the wrap machine sat on the only path from piece-pick to marshalling. Location swaps inside the pick face would have saved steps and still dumped every tote at the same pinch. We said so, which disappointed the manager who wanted a slotting-only answer. The honest list was twelve SKU swaps plus a marshalling reroute that belonged to the site, not to us.

If you cannot spare a practitioner, do the timed walk yourselves on the worst wave of the week. Write waits in the margin. The first congestion you cannot explain with “people chatting” is the one a slotting map should treat as a constraint, not a footnote.