7 options and ideas to enhance custom picking bins

Chances are, your direct rivals are already using order picking bins. As a result, they can fulfil orders quickly and efficiently, keeping their customers happy with short lead times. They have minimised damage to their inventory during storage, and have most likely reduced their labour costs or used the efficiency gains to help process more orders.

All of this through the effective use of order-picking bins.

So what can you do? You obviously want your business to offer at least as good a service as your rivals, and preferably better. But how do you do this if they are already using picking bins and an effective order picking and packing process?

One answer could be to explore advanced tactics for your order-picking and packing processes.

A simpler answer, however, could be to take advantage of the customisation options available when using specific order-picking equipment, particularly picking bins.

You might already be using picking bins, however. As mentioned at the beginning, your competitors may well be using picking bins or similar products too, diluting or negating any advantage you may have had over them.

So what do you do?

Well, there are at least seven options to enhance your order picking bins, each of which can drive down costs, aid productivity, and potentially give you an edge on your competition.

The main customisation options available, depending on the specific solution you choose, are as follows:

• Custom colours
• Changing strength and material thickness
• Tailored sizes
• Internal dividers
• External print
• Labels
• Freestanding or shelf design
• Specialist materials and properties

When requesting specific colours for picking bins, many businesses’ first thought is to tie this in with their company’s branding – this makes perfect sense.

It makes your warehouse look smart. If you ever give customers or suppliers a tour, it is a way to reinforce your brand message. It can even help create employee affinity with your brand.

With stock-picking bins available in a wide range of colours and custom equivalents in almost any hue, many companies will match their branding where possible.

However, another approach is to use the colour of your picking bins to clearly highlight different ranges and products. For example, if you are a fashion retailer, you could use green bins for evening wear, red bins for shoes, and blue bins for casual items.

This will, at a very basic level, help your order-picking team find and recall where specific items are stored in your warehouse or storage facility, and any efficiency gains can be passed on to your customers through shorter lead times.

Correx® is easy to convert by die-cutting. This process involves using a sharp steel knife cutting form, similar to a cookie cutter. Specialist equipment compresses the corrugated sheets and cutting form together under high pressure to create the required shape and dimensions.

Die-cutting can also add creases to the material, making assembly easier (e.g., when folding to create a Correx® box or tray). Creasing is where the shape blades do not pierce through the material’s surface but create an impression to aid folding.

However, it is essential to consider flute direction. The material bends easily along with flutes, but folding across the flutes is more difficult.

Similar to the colours of your bins, if this is not practical or you wish to remain very tightly on brand, labels can be used as an alternative.

In fact, it’s widely considered good practice to use labels and colour coding, as colours can indicate a product group or range, with labels providing specific information on the individual products or sizes within.

Whilst self-adhesive labels can be used, a more flexible solution is integrated or separately attached label holders. These allow for card inserts to be held in place, which can then be removed and changed as your product range is frequently updated.

Again, this can help to minimise time spent looking for a product, which in turn allows you to offer faster fulfilment of your orders.

Many people will also consider printing their picking bins.

Whilst this can be used for stock segmentation, it’s not suitable if your product lines are likely to change often. It also lends itself only to adding higher-level product ranges or groups, rather than specific items, due to the setup costs of printing. Digital print can alleviate this to a degree, however.

Where printed picking bins really come into their own, however, is through adding branding and company logos.

Whilst not essential, it can certainly help improve the appearance of your warehouse or storage areas and add an air of professionalism, which can be important if people from outside your business are likely to be taken to your warehouse.

Moving back to more practical customisation options, if you decide to go with Correx or corrugated cardboard, you can specify custom-sized picking bins.

Whilst most standard bins are designed to work alongside the common sizes of racking, hence why they are sometimes called rack bins or shelf bins, this may not be suitable for your own setup or for your specific products.

By choosing custom sizes, you can tailor them specifically to your products and the amount of stock you would like to hold for each, and even incorporate features, such as internal print, that will quickly indicate when you are running low on a particular line.

It should also be mentioned that another inherent benefit of using custom-sized bins is that, because they are not moulded, they can usually be folded flat. The key benefit is that they can be collapsed and stored flat when not in use, saving you space and making them suitable for peak times if required.

Besides the size of your picking bins, there are, in fact, a number of different designs that you could specify.

For example, you may wish to have picking bins with a fully open front or a semi-open front. You may prefer bins that resemble boxes, or even those that incorporate an opening-and-closing feature at the front.

However, in addition to “shelf-bins”, it’s possible to create what are known as “stacking boxes” or “stacking bins”.

These, instead of sitting on shelves or racking, are free-standing and can be used at the end of aisles or other underutilised floor space. Saying that they can also be created to specific sizes that fit within your racking, truly maximising the space available to you.

By stacking bins, you can also create “columns” of products, again grouping by type, size, or colour, which will allow easier picking and stock checking.

Further to this, both stacking bins and shelf equivalents can be subdivided using internal dividers and partitions.

The obvious use of this is to allow you to keep multiple different sizes or colours of a product in one large outer bin, again making your warehouse staff’s lives easier when retrieving products.

There are other uses, however. For example, dividers could be used to visually highlight stock levels; if two or four compartments are empty, a reorder or additional manufacturing is needed.

Besides this, internal dividers can offer a range of properties. For example, using Bubble-board material covered with foam or other material can help eliminate surface scratches or blemishes when items are stored or moved in the picking bins, whilst the dividers can also be used to separate items of this type and prevent them from damaging each other’s surfaces.

If you’re looking to specify custom picking bins, you can choose a material that is most suitable for your application.

For example, for light items, you may use a relatively lightweight grade of cardboard or plastic Correx, as this will still provide the requisite organisation and protection, whilst minimising costs.

However, for protection and safe storage of heavier items, a stronger, more durable material should be used. Whilst this will cost more initially, it’s important to consider the lifetime costs at this stage. A more robust product will cost more but will also last longer and protect its contents better.

This is why moulded plastic bins are also very popular, offering exceptional protection, but they are frequently over-specified and can be very expensive for many applications.

Saying that, it must be noted that Correx in particular can be designed and manufactured to provide exceptional strength, which is comparable to moulded plastic Euro bins but at a much more cost-effective price point.

Finally, if you’re producing specialist items that require additional protection in storage, you may be able to take advantage of picking bins with specific properties.

For example, if your inventory consists of microchips and other static-sensitive devices or components, you could consider an anti-static option such as Corriplast (conductive Correx) or even Corstat.

You can also source corrugated cardboard picking bins that are moisture-resistant, although plastic bins offer this by default. Bins with smooth, coated walls to prevent damage are also available, as are solutions with VCI corrosion-inhibiting properties, although other design criteria need to be met for this to be effective.

The clear benefits of these types of products are minimising, or in many cases completely eradicating, damage caused to items during spells in storage, which are then effectively written off as a cost to your business.

It’s obviously important not only to provide your customers with the highest levels of service but also to gain any competitive advantage you can over your competitors.

So, whilst the efficiency, productivity, and cost gains from using custom picking bin options may be relatively small when taken in isolation, they can add up to really drive improvements across your warehouse and order fulfilment processes.