Order Picker

An order picker, also called a man-up truck or turret truck, is a warehouse vehicle that raises its operator, standing on a platform beside the forks, up to the level of the item being picked, rather than raising only the load the way an ordinary forklift does. The design answered a problem tall, narrow-aisle warehouses created for themselves: once pallet racking reached several stories high to pack more storage into the same floor space, a worker on the ground could no longer safely reach individual cartons stored on the upper levels, and lowering a whole pallet just to remove one case wasted the very density the racking was built for. Riding the truck up to the pick face lets a single operator select individual units or cartons from any level of the rack directly into a cart or tote carried on the same machine, which is the ordinary task of fulfilling a customer order rather than moving a whole pallet at once. Order pickers are standard equipment in distribution centers built around split-case picking, where most outbound orders call for less than a full pallet of any one item.