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Put-to-light order sortation: batch pick first, sort at the wall

Put-to-light reverses the picking logic: goods for a whole batch of orders are picked together and only split at the put wall. The operator scans an item, the slot it belongs to lights up, and the put is confirmed. Travel shrinks, dozens of orders are sorted in parallel, and a wrong put is caught before the parcel leaves.

At a glance

  • Dozens of orders sorted in parallel
  • Standard 60, Pro 120 or a custom size
  • Put wall hardware and software built in-house since 2018

Where batch picking loses its advantage

Batch picking shortens travel but leaves a pile of goods that still has to be split. Sorting by paper or by screen is slow, demands concentration and is exactly where orders get mixed up. The more orders in a batch, the longer it takes to find the right slot and the higher the chance a customer receives someone else's items.

Put-to-light order sortation: batch pick first, sort at the wall

What a light-guided put wall delivers

Scan, then a lit slot

Nothing to search for or read. After the scan, only the slot the item belongs to lights up, with the quantity where needed.

Sized to your volume

Put walls range from 20 to more than 200 slots. Standard 60 suits mid-sized shops, Pro 120 high-volume operations, or we build a custom size and layout.

Quick changeover for campaigns

Assigning slots to orders, customers or delivery routes is a software setting, so the wall is reconfigured for a promotion or season without any rebuilding.

Completeness check

The system knows what is still missing from each slot and signals a complete order with light so the packer can take it straight away.

How it works

  1. 1The WMS groups orders into a batch and assigns each one a slot on the wall.
  2. 2Goods for the whole batch are picked together, for example with a cart in one trip.
  3. 3At the wall the operator scans an item and the target slot lights up.
  4. 4The put is confirmed by button or sensor and the remaining quantity is updated.
  5. 5A complete order lights up on the packing side and goes to packing.

WMS and ERP integration

A put wall needs to know one thing: which item belongs to which order. It gets this from your WMS or ERP via REST API or MQTT and reports every put and every completed order back in real time. Slot assignment can be driven by your own system, by Logisio WMS or by our CI4 software, which also runs locally without internet.

Software

What to prepare for an inquiry

  • How many orders you want to sort per batch
  • Typical item and packaging dimensions
  • Whether you sort for end customers, stores or routes
  • Space available for the wall and packing area
  • The system that builds batches today (WMS, ERP)

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In practice

Zuty (Westlogic s.r.o.)

Elimination of complaints and 2 FTE savings per shift

Read the case study

Frequently asked questions

Pick-to-light shows where to take goods from, so the light sits on the shelf. Put-to-light shows where to place them, so the light sits on a put wall slot or a tote on the cart. The technology is the same; only the direction of flow differs. Many warehouses combine both: batch pick from shelves, then sort via put-to-light.

The system supports multi-operator work with colour coding. Each person gets a colour and sees only their own instructions, so they do not get in each other's way at the same wall. With LED strips in aluminium profiles, up to 8 operators can work at one station. How many make sense depends mainly on wall length and goods flow.

No. E-commerce is the most common application, but the same principle works for sorting goods for stores, delivery routes, returns or assembling kits and sets. A slot then stands for a store, a route or a target location rather than an order. What matters is having many items that must be split quickly and accurately into several destinations.

The starting point is the number of orders per batch and the size of your goods. Mid-sized online shops usually manage with Standard 60, high-volume operations choose Pro 120, and for specific needs we design a custom size and layout. The wall can grow with your volume, so there is no need to buy maximum capacity on day one.

Other applications

All applications

Shall we look at your operation?

Send us your number of locations, orders and shifts – we will propose a setup and a payback estimate.

Book Consultation Write to us