In warehouses across the country, workers are hitting a wall.
“Halfway through my shift, I feel depleted and sluggish. I just can’t seem to keep my numbers up. I feel defeated.”
If you’ve heard similar comments echoing through your warehouse aisles or breakroom, you’re not alone. These words reflect an everyday reality for many warehouse workers—especially order pickers—who shoulder some of the most physically demanding and mentally taxing responsibilities in a distribution center.
From the moment they clock in, order pickers face:
- Repetitive and physically strenuous tasks
- Intense accuracy requirements
- Limited or inefficient training
- Tight production schedules
- Ongoing ergonomic strain
Prolonged standing, bending, reaching and lifting are physically and mentally straining. This daily grind results in fatigue, decreased efficiency and, ultimately, burnout—contributing to high turnover and reduced productivity.
Labor Shortage Challenge
Today’s ultra-competitive labor market makes attracting warehouse talent difficult—and retaining staff is even harder. What makes a company stand out? Some might say it’s a focus on safety, efficiency and creating a satisfying work environment that reduces physical and cognitive stress.
Experienced workers want tools that help them work smarter and safer. At the same time, younger employees—digital natives—expect to use modern technology in the workplace. Traditional, manual order-picking systems often fall short of both expectations.
Bridging the Skills Gap
Traditional, legacy order-picking processes often rely on knowledge exchange between more experienced workers and those who are new. Many operations feature an experienced order release operator who knows how to group paper pick tickets better than everyone else; however, that knowledge isn’t easily transferred, doesn’t scale well and is less efficient than the optimized digital order release process embedded in voice-directed picking operations.
In many cases, operational demands and onboarding constraints mean new employees are left to navigate the job alone—leading to errors, frustration and early burnout.
The Cost of Inefficiency
Manual order fulfillment is not just strenuous—it’s expensive. Order picking, quality control and packing activities can account for over 60% of a distribution center’s total labor spend.
These activities add up, costing businesses far more than they bargained for. When combined with high turnover, costly training cycles and lost productivity, inefficiencies in the picking process can significantly impact a company’s bottom line.
Estimates suggest that onboarding a new warehouse employee can cost between $4,000 and $5,000—excluding lost output and increased error rates during the ramp-up period.
Fortunately, voice-directed order fulfillment technology exists that can ensure same-day, high-priority orders ship on time while cutting your labor spend in half when integrated with a WES platform that optimizes order release, batches, waves or continuously releases orders, and cartonizes to enable picking directly to the shipping carton.
A Better Way: Voice Picking Technology
Traditional order picking with paper lists or handheld scanners requires employees to constantly reference and confirm information manually, leaving room for human error and inefficiency. In fact, employees using traditional picking methods create an average of 12 errors a shift.
Order picking in this manner usually requires workers to physically traverse the warehouse multiple times a day. Repetitive tasks like prolonged standing, walking, bending, reaching and placing put added strain on employees over time, leading to ergonomic strain, fatigue, stress and injury.
Voice-picking technology offers a smarter, more ergonomic alternative. Also known as “pick-by-voice,” this system guides workers through their tasks using voice commands and barcode scan validation, creating a streamlined, hands-free workflow.
What is Voice Picking Technology?
Voice-picking systems are wearable, voice-activated solutions that direct workers through pick paths using verbal instructions. Employees typically wear ergonomic headsets, use hands-free barcode scanners and interact with mobile touchscreens—enabling them to focus on the task without juggling papers or devices.
Voice commands and product barcode scan validation keep operators focused without distractions, reducing errors and fatigue simultaneously.
A paperless and hands-free voice-picking system can:
- Reduce repetitive motion and walking
- Improve order accuracy
- Simplify and speed up training
- Support same-day order fulfillment
- Reduce walking and forklift driving time by up to 50% when integrated into a top-tier WES.
Voice-picking technology activates three senses (hearing, sight and touch) to streamline warehouse operations while reducing physical and mental fatigue. Because employees use multiple senses for each pick, picking accuracy improves, eliminating the days when employees accidentally invert a number when looking at a sheet of paper or an RF screen.
Pick-by-voice technology and barcode scanning can work within milliseconds, increasing the speed of the picking activity and eliminating manual keystrokes on an RF device.
Voice Pick Technology Scalable for Any Size Operation
Voice pick technology is not reserved for large enterprises.
Small- and medium-sized businesses can realize significant gains in worker productivity and satisfaction. If your business relies on manual workstations for sorting, order consolidation, parcel manifesting and shipping, you can experience significant returns by integrating Voice Picking as part of an automated pick, pack and ship operation. This “more than voice” philosophy considers voice pick technology even more powerful when integrated with warehouse management (WMS) and other systems, including ERP and robotics, to optimize the entire ecosystem and drive data-driven decision-making.
Warehouse automation, like voice technology, can improve the accuracy and timeliness of managing and moving products throughout the facility.
Other benefits include:
- Easy-to-learn, intuitive interfaces
- Faster onboarding for new employees
- Boosted confidence and job satisfaction
- Higher throughput and reduced error rates
- Improved ergonomics and safety
By reducing the physical and cognitive strain on your workforce, you can create a more supportive environment, leading to longer employee retention, greater productivity and improved operational margins.
A Modern Solution to Automate Warehouses
Warehouse automation doesn’t have to mean robots replacing workers. In the case of voice picking, it’s about empowering workers—helping them do their jobs better, faster and more safely and providing their companies which battle turnover and shrinking margins with a tool that gives them a competitive advantage.
As Vice President of Business Development at the Numina Group, Patrick Hanrahan works closely with companies to solve their order fulfillment challenges. In this role, he helps clients assess their current operations, identify problem areas, and review warehouse automation technology options to resolve them. His clients include sporting goods companies, e-commerce, medical supply, B2P, electronics, and food fulfillment, among others. Recent projects include combining parallel picking processes like Goods to Person Automation and Autonomous Mobile Robots with Victory Voice and Pack and Ship Automation.