Vision Picking
Those in the warehousing/industrial space know that minimizing time to sort, track and pick inventory is critical to yielding the best business outcomes. With the increasing speed of new AR (augmented reality) technology being produced, inventory picking is being revolutionized.
As many of you may remember, Google pumped large amounts of advertising spend into promoting their 2015 pilot product, Google Glass. These were glasses with a small LED panel in them that would allow the users to see a myriad of AR features to their daily activities, such as live weather reporting, navigation, and many more. Those this product never picked up solid traction on the consumer level, the product was revolutionary in its concept.
Expanding on that technology, visionaries with the warehousing industry in mind created a new type of AR glasses for their employees. Introducing 'Vision Picking' - equipping warehouse employees with advanced smart glasses that visually display where each item is and then where it needs to be placed.
As seen in the image to the right and above is a visualization of what a warehouse employee might see if they were utilizing vision picking glasses.
Many of you who shop at the popular grocery chain Kroger may know that they are offering online ordering services for their customers. This still requires an employee to walk through the store any manually pick their requested items for their cart. Though they have implemented useful technology into a handheld device which drastically reduces the time it take for employees to pick the items, it has been shown that vision picking reduced the time it takes to pick items much more than handheld devices can.
Some of the benefits of these smart glasses are as follows:
- Visual displays of order picking instructions, number of pick locations
- Information on where items are located and where they need to be placed on a cart
- Hands free scanning of barcodes on anything from a picklist to a product
- Voice recognition with ability to program languages
- Recommends best pick path
- Single and multi-unit order picking
- Leads to more efficient and comfortable picking
For more information and a demonstration of how this works, click on the image below to view a short video on vision picking.
