The supply processing and dispatch (SPD) department of Wausau Hospital is responsible for providing required medical and surgical supplies to more than 300 locations at any moment, 24/7. If that isn't demanding enough, the department faced a two-fold challenge: it needed to make orderpicking more cost-effective while using less distribution space.

A horizontal carousel system accomplished both tasks by reducing floor space 75% and reducing the cost per pick 88%.

By eliminating manual orderpicking and saving floor space, the department has significantly reduced the cost of processing an order from about 60 cents to only 7 cents.

It has even helped the department to process twice as many orders a month with 100% accuracy.

Four horizontal carousels now store more than 254,000 stock keeping units (SKUs) within a 943 square foot area. That's a vast improvement over the department's old system where 2,829 additional square feet of space were required to store the same number of items on shelves and carts.

"Having materials such as critical surgical supplies to everyday support items on hand when doctors and nurses need them is our department's mission," says Dale Bouvat, materials management operations manager, SPD department. "But that was difficult to do when workers had to search up and down an aisle for items to fill an order." The department averaged 36 errors a month.

Today, carousels handle 99% of the department's orders with zero errors. The automated system processes as many as 21,000 orders each month, compared to 10,000 items with its former manual system.

Picking tasks begin when orders are entered into an inventory management software system. The system directs the carousels to travel the shortest path to present the proper carrier to an operator. Then a pick light tower at the end of the carousel lights up to indicate the part number, quantity and location to fill an order. An operator makes the pick and confirms it by hitting a "task complete" button.

The carousel system makes three types of picks: batch picks, single retrieves and stat picks. The majority of picking consists of batch picking up to seven orders with 10 to 30 items per order. A stat pick occurs when a facility immediately needs an item. When this occurs, the batch picking process is paused and an operator is directed to make the stat pick. The batch picking operation then resumes where it left off as soon as the stat pick is completed.

Each of the carousels has 36 carriers with seven levels adjusted at different heights. The system ensures orderpicking efficiency by pre-positioning carriers for subsequent picks while an operator is busy with a current pick. As soon as a task is complete, the pick tower directs an operator to the next pick.

It is also much easier and faster to locate SKUs since the carousel's software identifies inventory by SKU number and alias name. Before, each item had multiple names, which made manually retrieving products very difficult and time-consuming, says Bouvat.