Goods-to-person picking at Smith Drug Company
Using the new system, picking productivity increased from 140 lines to nearly 900 lines per man hour.
By Bob Trebilcock, Executive Editor -- Modern Materials Handling, 10/7/2009
For as long as there has been picking, sending a person out to get the goods has been the way to go. The concept is simple: Put the product away in storage or a pick face, and when it's time to fill an order, send a picker to that location to get the goods. Let's call that person-to-goods picking.
But person-to-goods picking isn't the only way to go. With the right order profile and volume, facilities can realize significant productivity gains by turning the tried and true picking formula on its head and employing automated storage, conveyance and data collection technologies to bring the goods to the person. Let's call that goods-to-person picking.
What kind of gains are we talking about? When it comes to slow-moving stock keeping units (SKUs), 100 picks per hour is an average rate in a conventional warehouse. A goods-to-person picking solution, on the other hand, can support sustained picking rates of 450 to 800 picks per hour, depending on the product and the system, and up to 1,000 picks per hour during a portion of a shift.
The gains in productivity come from keeping an associate in one place to do the job and then automatically delivering the items to be picked from storage. Most typically, the systems are used to consolidate and automate the handling of slow-moving items that get fewer than 25 to 30 picks per hour, but in applications where there is a relatively high volume of total picks.
One early adopter of goods-to-the person picking is Smith Drug Company, a pharmaceutical distributor to independent pharmacies throughout the mid-south and southeastern United States.
In 2008, Smith Drug installed three high-speed A-frames to improve picking operations at its 244,000 square foot distribution center in Spartanburg, S.C., one of two facilities operated by the distributor.
The A-frames were designed to handle the 6,300 fastest-moving SKUs in a facility that handles about 26,000 SKUs in total, says Isaac Rogers, director of organization development at Smith Drug. Getting more efficient with its fastest-moving items, however, highlighted inefficiencies in the rest of the facility.
"We discovered that we had about 10,500 slow-moving items so we could only get about 140 lines per man hour because we had to do so much walking," says Rogers. Given Smith Drug's tight turnaround times on orders, those slow movers bogged down operations. "We deliver 70% of our orders by 10 a.m. the next day," Rogers says. "We had to find a faster way to pick our slow movers."
The solution was a goods-to-person system (Schaefer Systems International, 704-731-1625, www.ssi-schaefer.com) that stores 10,500 SKUs in just 6,600 square feet. The remaining SKUs are still picked using voice recognition technology.
How does it work? The system consists of two pick stations with four horizontal carousel pods per station, or eight carousels in total. Each pick station has seven slots for shipping totes, which allow an associate to pick seven orders at a time. Product, meanwhile, is stored in the carousels in storage totes. Each storage tote can have up to eight storage compartments.
To fill orders, pre-labeled shipping totes are conveyed from an order start area to the pick station. Based on the orders to be filled, the system automatically retrieves and conveys storage totes from the carousel to the pick station. An automatic bar code scan identifies the storage tote when it arrives at the pick station, and a computer screen tells the associate how many items to pick from that tote. A separate light bar indicates which compartment to pick from. A light barrier confirms that the associate picked from the right compartment. "If you break the wrong light barrier, the system stops you and directs you to correct it," says Rogers. The system then indicates which shipping container gets the parts.
Once the last product has been picked to a shipping tote, the system releases it and automatically conveys it to a quality control station or directly to the shipping area.
Since going live last September, Rogers says associates who once picked 140 lines per hour are now picking 800 to 900 lines per hour. In fact, it's been so successful, that Smith is implementing another system in its Valdosta, Ga., facility. "We can get a new associate up and running on the system in about 7 minutes," Rogers says. "The space we've freed up by compressing the storage area will allow us to expand our business in the future without adding more space."
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