Warehouse & DC: Voice broadens its horizons
Over the last five years, voice technology went from “bleeding edge” to “leading edge” to ultimately joining the ranks of other affordable, reliable technologies for use in picking operations. Here’s where it’s going and how it’s being applied by two savvy DC managers.
By Maida Napolitano, Contributing Editor -- Logistics Management, 7/1/2009
The verdict is in and there’s very little debate: Voice-directed picking has proven time and again that it can help companies make significant strides in productivity, accuracy, and safety improvement. By converting pick lists to voice commands and transmitting them to workers via headsets linked to wearable, mobile computers over wireless networks, voice allows workers to free their hands and eyes for the most important task at hand—the picking of product. And by all accounts, interest in voice, especially in grocery and retail verticals, is not expected to wane anytime soon.
According to Eric Lamphier, senior director of product management for Manhattan Associates, his company’s voice implementations are going global with the majority of the demand coming from private, non-3PL sectors. “The grocery/food customers have certainly been leaders when it comes to implementing the technology, as full case, pick-to-pallet operation remains a very good fit for voice,” says Lamphier, adding that the healthcare and pharmaceutical sectors are rapidly following.
Tom Singer, principal at supply chain services provider Tompkins Associates, agrees with Lamphier’s assessment, but puts forth another theory for voice’s growing popularity. “Over the past few years,” says Singer, “top tier solution providers like Manhattan and Red Prairie have been collaborating with vendors and voice developers offering direct interface, out-of-the-box voice solutions.” Users simply pay a licensing fee for their pick engines to become voice-enabled.
According to both Singer and Lamphier, perhaps the latest technological development with voice responsible for driving its growth is the introduction of multi-modal devices. “What it gives you is the ability for dual use,” says Singer. “Pickers can work in a voice-only mode when doing straight picking, but switch to the screen or display when doing cycle counts and replenishments.”
With this progress in mind, let’s examine two fairly recent applications of voice that are putting many of these new developments to use on the warehouse/DC floor. First, we feature how the introduction of a voice-enabled, warehouse management system (WMS) paved the way for Fox Racing’s multichannel distribution center to drastically speed up its piece-picking. Second, we’ll meet the team at Performance Food Group whose rapid adoption of voice in 18 facilities over a 15-month period increased accuracy levels in their full case, pick-to-pallet operations.
Fox Racing doubles pick rates
Headquartered in Morgan Hill, Calif., Fox Racing is in the business of manufacturing and distributing high-quality apparel and gear for motocross, BMX, wakeboarding, surfing, and mountain biking enthusiasts in the U.S. and abroad. Over the past three decades, the company has grown into a multichannel business, distributing merchandise to motocross dealers and department stores in addition to stocking its own fleet of six retail stores plus an online store.
In early 2008, plans were underway for a new WMS installation, creating an opportune time for the company to reconfigure a low-tech picking process riddled with inefficiencies. With 85 percent of its volume picked in piece quantities, the company had been picking multiple orders with paper pick lists into grocery shopping carts for years. Robby Dhesi, Fox Racing’s director of distribution, summed up the operation in two words: “A mess.”
Picking six to eight orders at a time, each picker had to manually track which product goes with which order while trying to separate them in the four corners of the shopping cart, the top child seat rack, and the bottom rack designed for large or heavy items.
As if that wasn’t enough, paper pick lists had the tendency to simply disappear. “We wouldn’t know until the end of the day,” recalls Dhesi, “There was no traceability.” To top it all off, error rates were very high. “We used to get about 15 to 20 carts of mispicks at the end of each day,” adds Dhesi.
Fox Racing’s project team knew things had to change. They decided to look at three different technologies: picking with a radio frequency (RF) gun, picking with pick-to-light, and voice-directed picking. The RF gun was quickly ruled out. “We wanted to shoot for 100 percent accuracy,” says Dhesi, “so we wanted our pickers to scan each product’s UPC.” Most of the brand’s merchandise came in polybags; but due the glare from the bag, they needed to scan it multiple times before the gun would register. In addition, pickers would have had to constantly move their guns in and out of their holsters, read instructions on the display, and then scan location codes.
Although pick-to-light could admittedly be faster than voice, it didn’t have the flexibility that they needed in a business that was constantly changing. Dhesi also felt that with “pure” pick-to-light there was no way to verify accuracy.
A pilot demonstration involving a voice-enabled WMS from HighJump in partnership with Vocollect convinced the team that picking with voice would not only be the best fit, but it would also be the most cost efficient. “With voice we got the best of both worlds,” says Dhesi. “Voice nearly matches the productivity of pick-to-light and the accuracy of an RF gun.”
In Fox Racing’s new voice-directed picking operation, a picker is directed to a location where he speaks the location’s check digit as an initial verification, and then the last three digits of the UPC as a second verification. Using new picking carts, pickers work on multiple orders at a time, placing product directly into its shipping carton. To ensure that the correct product goes to the correct carton, each picker would speak and verify the check digit on the shipping carton.
The system took less than for four weeks to implement, and within the first 30 days the team had doubled their picking rates from 70 lines per hour to 150—a 114 percent improvement—and cut the number of pickers from 35 to 18. With paper, the operation used 23 checking and packing stations to reach an accuracy rate of 99.82 percent. Voice reduced the number of checking stations to six, while increasing accuracy rates to 99.99 percent.
To top it off, training time has been reduced from a full day to less than two hours with pickers achieving full productivity by the end of the second day of use. According to Dhesi, Fox achieved payback in six months—six months earlier than projected.
This chart is based on a 2009 benchmarking survey conducted by the Supply Chain Consortium based on 270 participating retail, manufacturing, and wholesale/distribution companies
PFG raises the standard
As the third largest food distribution company in the country, Performance Food Group (PFG) operates a nationwide broadline distribution business with 18 operating companies, now known as Performance Foodservice, which markets and distributes food and food-related products to independent “mom and pop” type restaurants as well as chain restaurants, schools and other institutions.
To manage operations across so many DCs, PFG had built a centralized IT infrastructure using a Wide Area Network (WAN) based in its company headquarters in Richmond, Va. This centralized approach removes the burden of IT-related tasks from each DC, so that each DC manager can instead focus on preserving and maintaining a consistently high standard of quality service to its customers. By early 2007, Jeff Williamson, PFG’s senior vice president of operations, was looking to raise its broadline division’s standard even higher
Williamson and his team had been using RF terminals for receiving, putaway, replenishment, and cycle counting, but for order selection, they had been picking with paper labels. They plan to continue using these paper labels, as it aids their selectors in stacking the cases onto the pallets in appropriate stop sequence and helps the drivers in distinguishing product intended for specific deliveries. Picking with paper labels had already allowed the company to achieve impressive productivity metrics, through the use of engineered labor standards and incentives, but the company recognized that there was still much room for improvement on other critical service levels.
PFG Broadline was specifically looking to increase accuracy by reducing truck shorts and mispicks. Williamson explains how “truck shorts” are instances when the customer did not get what they ordered for one of two reasons: either a product does not get on the truck because the selector did not pick it, or a product does not get to the customer because the delivery driver mistakenly gave the case away at a prior stop. A mispick is defined as picking an item different from what was ordered.
“With voice technology, our intention was to prevent or reduce mispicks, as well as to reduce or eliminate the number of truck shorts related to the product not making it to the truck,” he explains. In short, PFG’s decision to use voice selection was based entirely on improving their picking accuracy with no adverse effect on their productivity.
By September 2007, PFG had launched a pilot program using Voxware 3 software and LXE’s mobile, voice-only units. “We rolled out our very first post-pilot location in January 2008,” says Williamson. “We did about one facility a month and completed the last three of the 18 facilities in early 2009.”
Implementation went smoothly with the voice software easily interfacing with PFG’s existing centralized IT infrastructure, enabling the management of voice-directed operations across multiple DCs from a single, centralized location.
Today, information is communicated and updated to all workers in real time. When a selector indicates that an item is short, the system sends a signal immediately to the lift truck operator telling him to do a replenishment. When the replenishment is complete, it sends a message back to the selector’s headset indicating that the replenishment is complete, so he can go back and complete his order.
As a result, truck shorts were reduced by 60 percent. Picking accuracy rose from 99.90 percent before voice to 99.97 percent after voice. PFG achieved a nine month return on its investment, while experiencing side benefits of fewer training hours, shorter learning curves, and more selectors working at higher productivity levels.
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