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Order-Fulfillment Systems
Published in David E. Mulcahy, John P. Dieltz, Order-Fulfillment and Across-the-Dock Concepts, Design, and Operations Handbook, 2003
David E. Mulcahy, John P. Dieltz
All of the picked items go into totes that are routed to a sorter induction point. Here, an operator removes the items from the tote and places them on an induction belt with the bar code in the correct orientation. The SKU is inducted onto a station on the sorter. The sorter can be either a large oval, shaped much like a racetrack (tilt- tray and some cross-belt sorters), or a straight line (small cross-belt sorters). When the SKU reaches the correct bin or packing station, the tilt-tray will tilt and dump the SKU into the chute (Figure 3.14). The cross-belt sorter accomplishes the same thing, but instead of tilting to put the SKU in the proper location, a motor rotates the belt to put the item into the right location.
A flow picking system for order fulfillment in e-commerce warehouses
Published in IISE Transactions, 2021
Peng Yang, Zhijie Zhao, Zuo-Jun Max Shen
After the items have been retrieved from their storage locations, they are placed into a tote, regardless of their original order attribution. When the tote is full, it is transported by conveyor to an automated unit sorter to be sorted. Taking the cross belt sorter as an example, the sorting system consists of several induction stations, a series of small belt conveyors riding on a continuous loop track, chutes, and put walls as shown in Figure 2. When the tote arrives at an induction station by conveyor, workers scan the bar codes of items to identify item information, bind items and belt conveyors, and assign each item to an appropriate chute. With the movement of the cross belt sorter, the belt conveyor carries the item to the assigned chute and releases it. Items of multiple orders may share a chute. At the bottom of the chute, there is a put wall with tens of order cartons on it. Workers sort the released items by order and put each order into an individual order carton according to the Personal Digital Assistant (PDA’s) instructions.