What is wave picking?

Wave picking treats the day's orders as a schedule rather than a queue. Instead of picking orders as they arrive, the system collects them into waves and releases each wave at a planned time: the 9am wave covers everything that must make the noon carrier pickup, the 1pm wave feeds the afternoon truck routes, a separate wave handles the bulky items that need the forklift. The payoff is coordination. Within a wave, picks can be batched and zoned so each picker handles one area, packing stations receive work in a steady stream instead of bursts, and nothing destined for the 3pm cutoff is still sitting in an aisle at 2:55. Waves also give supervisors a planning unit: how many lines is the 9am wave, how many pickers does that need, is wave 2 running late. The honest scoping note: wave picking earns its complexity at hundreds of orders a day with multiple pickers and hard cutoffs. A shop fulfilling thirty orders a day gets the same shipping reliability from a simple rule like "batch and pick everything once at 10am and once at 2pm," which is wave picking in spirit without the software ceremony. The underlying idea transfers at any scale: release picks in planned groups tied to real deadlines, not one at a time as they land.