How would you choose a picking strategy, and what makes a warehouse management system a real-time system?
Warehouse picking strategy depends on order profile, SKU velocity, layout and travel time. A WMS becomes real-time when picker task dispatch, stock exceptions and replenishment decisions must respond while people are waiting in the aisle.
Answer
Short answer
Choose a warehouse picking strategy from the order profile and layout. Discrete, batch, zone, wave and goods-to-person picking each trade travel, sortation, latency and order integrity differently. In a WMS, the system is real-time because task dispatch affects a person waiting in an aisle and because a dispatched task changes stock commitments immediately.
Keep wms explicit in the answer because that is the concept the interviewer is actually trying to test. A good wms explanation names the trade-off, the failure mode, and the evidence you would use before choosing. Use wms once more at the decision point so the answer reads as judgement rather than a detached example.
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Likely follow-ups
- A picker reports a short at a location the system says holds twelve. What happens to the order, and to the count?
- How would your answer change in a goods-to-person installation where the picker does not travel?
- The WMS loses connectivity to the handhelds for ten minutes. What should the floor do?
- How would you decide which stock keeping units get counted this week?
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