7.5 million order lines a year. About 30,000 a day, picked manually by a team of 60 operators. That's the scale of the MedTech distribution centre Optioryx used for its most recent case study, published 21 September 2026.

The distributor is not named in Optioryx's write-up. The numbers are.

What was actually wrong

Before Pulse, the DC ran a fixed Z-snake, serpentine, pick route. It was set up once and never matched to how the warehouse was actually laid out. Order clustering, which orders get grouped into one picking round, was left to the WMS's default logic rather than tuned for the site.

Jibbe Hoop, Distribution Engineer at the site, put the scale of the problem this way:

“We have roughly 7.5 million order lines each year…picked by a team of 60 operators.”

At that volume, a route that adds even a few extra metres per pick compounds fast. Neither fault shows up on a WMS dashboard. Both show up in pickers walking further than they need to, every shift.

What changed

Optioryx Pulse sits on top of the existing WMS and reworks two things: how orders are clustered and which route a picker walks.

Clustering moved to a box-first principle. Picks are tied to a physical handling unit, a trolley, before a picking round even starts, rather than being grouped after the fact. Route optimisation was layered on top.

Phase one landed a 15% productivity increase, which Optioryx describes as worth up to 9 FTE of picking capacity recovered without adding headcount.

Phase two added double-stacked trolleys to the same clustering logic. Total productivity gain stabilised at 27% after six weeks.

No retraining was needed. Pickers kept working the floor the way they always had. The optimisation ran in the background, which is the point of putting a layer on top of a WMS rather than replacing it.

Why this travels to South Africa

A fixed pick route, tuned once at go-live and never revisited, is not unusual. It's the default state of most WMS installs here too, whether the platform is Körber, SAP EWM, Manhattan or Fortna. Warehouse layouts change: new SKUs, reslotted zones, seasonal reconfigurations. The route very often doesn't change with them.

That's the same decay problem behind slotting plans going stale, just applied to the picker's path instead of the item's location. One drifts, the other should be checked at the same time.

Black Friday is 27 November, just under nine weeks from today. A change that needs no retraining and runs in the background is a low-risk one to make this close to peak. A WMS replacement is not.

We implement Pulse on top of the WMS you already run, as Optioryx's implementation partner for South Africa. If your pick routes haven't been reviewed since go-live, that's a one-afternoon conversation to find out whether the same gap exists on your floor.

Find out what your pick paths cost you

Send us 3 months of order lines and your location master. We'll show where Pulse would cut walking on your current WMS, before you commit to anything.

Book a picking review See how Pulse works

Sources