Whether it’s customized picking, value-added services, or meeting tough service-level and order accuracy agreements, customer requirements are a fact of life.
Most facilities cope by adding labor and chalking it up to the price of doing business. That works fine when the volumes are low. But as volumes rise, along with the number of customer requirements, those additional labor costs can be the difference between making and losing money on a customer.
Want to do it right? Here are five examples of how automated materials handling equipment, mobile computing and automatic data collection technologies, and warehouse management (WMS) and warehouse control (WCS) systems can work together to automate and manage some of the most common customer requirements.
1) Customer Requirement: Get it right or else.
To the sales team, landing an order with a big box retailer is a grand slam. To the DC that suddenly has to fill the orders, it’s like facing a 100-mph fastball: make one too many errors and you go down swinging. “One of our customers ships intimate apparel to Wal-Mart,” says Chris Castaldi, vice president of client development for AL Systems (800-548-3745, www.alsysinc.com). “They get one order each week to pack items in store-destined boxes for more than 3,000 stores.” In reality that’s like filling 3,000 orders for 25-200 garments. Since any errors can result in expensive charge backs, the DC has to be more accurate than ever.
The solution: Pick-to-light. When store orders are received in the WMS, the system produces a shipping label or an RFID smart label for each store. Those labels are applied to store-destined cartons that are scanned at the beginning of a picking zone. As the cartons pass down a conveyor, lights direct picking operations. To prevent errors, a percentage of the cartons are conveyed to a quality-assurance area…
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