You wrote: "With direct picking when I have SKUs in 916 they are all packed and ready to ship "
This is actually to quick and to rough for me as it describes only what you do in SAP. You are missing the physical movements and the physical part of preparation for delivery.
In a direct picking in SAP you really omit this physical part of packing.
Have a look at this picture from the SAP docu and imagine that 200 and 916 is the same physical place. Then all this action with the many arrows happens on short distance.
In direct picking you need to imagine all those arrows on the left site at Step1, this is long distance (moving stock from high rack to staging area vs preparing for delivery within the staging area) hence takes more time and effort.
see the detail steps in Two-Step Picking Process -