Warehouse picking is two jobs at once: reading the list and taking the item. A handheld terminal keeps interrupting the second one — put the device down, take the item, pick the device back up. It is a small loss repeated thousands of times a day.
What they did
DHL ran a pilot it called “vision picking” at its Bergen op Zoom site in the Netherlands. Pickers wore head-mounted displays; aisle, product location and quantity appeared in their field of view. Barcode reading happened through the glasses as well, leaving both hands completely free.
The measured result
- A 25% efficiency increase in the picking process
- The pilot ran for three weeks with 10 pickers
- More than 20,000 items were picked, fulfilling 9,000 orders
Those four figures come from DHL’s own publication. Error and cost percentages circulate elsewhere; we could not verify them, so they are not here.
What it means for a manufacturer
This is not a training case but a workflow case — though the lesson carries over: when the information sits where the work happens, in front of the eyes, the work stops being interrupted. Any site with sequenced picking — warehouse, dispatch, kit preparation — can build on the same logic.