“Speed of Light”
The Staff at J. Jill’s DC couldn’t say enough about the speed and accuracy of RF-based packing systems…until they saw what could be done with ligts.
James Aaron Cooke, DC Velocity May, 2007
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Last December, the staff at J. Jill's Tilton, N.H., DC finally saw the light—or in this case, the lights: 356 illuminated LED displays. After years of using a radio-frequency (RF)-based order fulfillment system, the facility was abandoning its handheld scanners in favor of something a bit flashier.
As throughput volume grew, it became clear that the DC would have to replace its old packing system with something speedier. "We had a decent rate with the RF," says Glenn Broderick, J. Jill's director of retail distribution. "Order fillers were doing 575 units an hour with 99.95 percent accuracy." But that wouldn't be enough to keep up with the company's aggressive growth plans, he explains. "We were looking to drive the throughput north of 800 units an hour."
The search for a replacement technology that wouldn't require significant modification to the material handling equipment (or extensive worker retraining) led J. Jill to light-directed order fulfillment technology. But instead of the more familiar pick-to-light technology, the retailer opted for a variation: a put-to-light system. Put-to-light systems work in much the same way as pick-to-light systems, but in reverse. With pick-to-light systems, illuminated displays are mounted at stock items' storage locations to indicate to pickers which items to retrieve. With put-to-light systems, the light displays are instead mounted at packing stations equipped with stationary cartons used to collect items for individual orders. Instead of telling pickers which items to retrieve, the flashing lights indicate where to distribute them.
Late last year, J. Jill installed AL Systems' DynaPack put-to-light system, a solution that incorporated 356 light display modules managed by a scalable software platform. Though the company expected to see a jump in productivity, Broderick says, it was still caught off guard by the size of the gains—and by the speed with which they were achieved.
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