Our warehouse picks to light. A tote comes down the aisle on a conveyor, a light comes on above the shelf with the next item, the picker takes one and presses the light, the tote moves on. It is all logged because every press is a person's pay. Aisle forty picks a full order every night at three with no picker clocked in, every light pressed, and the tote arrives at packing with the order in it.
I am a night shift manager at a distribution warehouse and the thing I manage is the picking.
How it works.
An order comes in. A tote goes down the aisle on a roller conveyor. Above the shelf location for the first item a light comes on showing a quantity. The picker takes that many, drops them in the tote, presses the light. It goes off and the next one comes on. At the end the tote goes to packing. Every press is logged with the time and the picker's badge, because the pickers are paid on rate, and a light pressed is a line picked.
Aisle forty picks an order every night at three. Nobody is badged onto aisle forty. Nobody is badged onto the floor at three, because three is the break.
The order.
A real one. It comes in through the system like any other, from a customer account, and it gets allocated to aisle forty, and the tote goes down, and the lights come on, and they go off, one after another, at the pace of a good picker, about four seconds a line, and the tote arrives at packing with every item in it, right quantities, and packing packs it and it ships, and the customer, presumably, gets it.
The badge on every press is a number the system does not have a person for.
What has been checked.
The lights, the conveyor, the scanner. All fine. A technician sat in aisle forty at three and watched the lights come on and go off in front of him, and watched the tote fill, and he did not see a hand, and he watched the items leave the shelves, one at a time, and go into the tote, and he said they did not fall, they were placed, and he has asked to be put on days.
The badge number. It is in the format we used before the system was replaced in 2011, and our old records are gone, and the agency that supplied our pickers then is gone, and the number is nobody's.
The customer account. A real account. A small shop, in a town about an hour away, that orders from us every week on a Tuesday. The three o'clock order is not one of theirs. It is on their account, it goes to their address, it is a mix of what they usually have, in small quantities, and they have rung us twice to say a parcel has come that they did not order, and we have told them to keep it, and they have, and it keeps coming.
Who.
I asked the oldest man on nights, who drives a forklift and has been here since before the system. He said aisle forty used to be a woman called something, he could not remember what, who picked that aisle for years, who knew every location by heart and did not need the lights, and who had been quick, and who had, one night, been quick onto the conveyor at the end of the aisle to stop a tote and gone with it into the sorter.
He said the sorter had been stopped for a week. He said her rate was the highest on the floor and the agency had used it as a target for years afterwards, until they went.
I asked what she had picked that night, before. He said he did not know, but that the order on the sorter, the one she had gone after, had been for a little shop about an hour away, and that it had never been sent.
What is done about it.
The three o'clock order ships. Finance have it as a system generated duplicate and the shop's account is credited for it each week, and the stock is written off as shrink, and the pick rate on aisle forty is the highest in the building and it is nobody's.
What I do.
I run nights.
I have stopped putting anybody on aisle forty. It picks itself, and the pickers I did put on it came off it saying that the lights went off before they could press them, that somebody was ahead of them in the aisle, that they could hear the quick breathing of a person working fast just round the end of the racking, and that the tote was always full before they got to it.
The shop has asked us to stop. I have told them we are looking into it. I have not told them that the order they get every week is the order that went on the sorter, the one that was never sent, being sent, and sent, and sent, by somebody who has been trying to finish her shift for fifteen years, and that every week it gets there, and every week it is not enough, because the system allocates her another one, and she has never once refused a pick.