going through the grocery store and accumulating the items on your groceny list into your cart. Each shopper is concerned with only his or her list.
The major advantage to the single order picking strategy is that order integrity is never jeopardized. The major disadvantage is that the order picker is likely to have to travel over a large portion of the warehouse to pick the order. Consequently, the walking time per line item picked is high. However, for large orders(that is, those greater than 10 line items), a single order may yield an efficient picking tour. In addition, in some systems, response time requirements do not enable orders to build up in queue to create efficient batches for order picking.
Batch Picking A second operating strategy for order picking is batch pick- ing. Instead of an order picker working on only one order at a time, orders are batched together. Order pickers take responsibility for retrieving a batch of orders during a picking tour. In the grocery store example, batch picking can be thought of as going to the grocery store with your shopping list and those of some of your neighbors. In one traversal of the grocery store, you