The Waddy Trolley:
Visiting over 1000 warehouses in 52 countries means you see a lot of very good, and a lot of very bad, when it comes to equipment, workflows and processes. Learning from the best of these and sharing with our community of ambitious brands as much as possible is what this blog is all about!
So: introducing the best trolley for e-commerce warehouse use, a trolley designed specifically for picking at high volumes, picking and sorting orders on the go, a trolley even designed to allow the warehouse to scale vertically for more pick-face space: The Waddy Trolley!
So named after the first person we saw using them down at Showpo, these trolleys are equipped for the specific demands of handling high volume e-commerce orders in the warehouse.
What makes these trolleys so special?
- Shelving – the totes set up on the shelves on the trolley pictured above are not set in stone. Each slot is a location that items are picked into, and become the location for all of the items of one particular order as the trolley and its driver make their way along their pick route. You can set up smaller or larger totes/slots, depending on the size of your items. For example, in the winter, if you are picking bulkier items like jumpers or coats, you would arrange the slots to be larger. However on the same trolley, if you were picking small boxes of jewellery for example, each slot location could be very small, allowing staff to pick 100s of orders in one run onto one trolley, sorting as they go.
- The Step Ladder – Indeed, that attachment on the side of the trolley is a small, light weight ladder. The genius behind this is that each picker, as they make their way around their pick routes, obviously has the option to reach up higher than without it. Therefore, you are able to add that extra level of racking along every aisle, increasing massively the number of pick locations you have immediate access to, and therefore the less time you need to spend on replenishment. Moreover, the ladder and the higher racking means you can maximise the not only the 2D floorspace of your existing warehouse, but moreover the 3D volume, thinking vertically. “We’ve run out of space” or “we’ve outgrown our warehouse” is often an issue raised sooner than it becomes true.
Other ideas:
- It might be sensible to consider a ‘curved’ hanging rail for hanging items like dresses or suits, so they are not crumpled or folded between pick location and pack bench
- Dedicated space for delicate items
- Transparent totes to see immediately whether they are full, empty etc
And here is the man himself, inventor of the Waddy Trolley, sharing his top tips for exceptional fulfilllment and brand building:
