For East Coast Salon Services, a full-service distributor of salon and spa products to the professional beauty industry, flexible orderpicking is everything. East Coast delivers over 7,000 different products to more than 4,000 customers throughout the Northeast. While some customers order in bulk, others order only a few items at a time.

This range led the distributor to implement a pick-to-light system with order fulfillment software to handle its ever-changing product mix. Now, the distributor not only manages order and product changes with ease, it fulfills orders faster with nearly 100% accuracy, and requires less than half the labor of manual orderpicking.

At its 48,000 square foot DC in Runnemede, N.J., East Coast installed a modular light-directed order fulfillment system that allows large orders to be picked in batches or small orders that can be picked in clusters of four. This gives East Coast the versatility it needs to fulfill orders.

The company's warehouse management system (WMS) communicates directly with the software running the pick-to-light system to optimize orderpicking. As orders are received by the picking software, lights are lit at locations where picking must occur. The orderpicker reads the quantity displayed at the location and picks the appropriate number of items into a tote before moving on to the next location.

The system's modularity also lets East Coast easily manage product changes as new products are introduced.

"The picking software seamlessly communicates with our WMS to give us 100% inventory visibility and tracking as well as 99.98% order accuracy," says Kevin Novak, operations manager. Each orderpicker now picks about 670 more items per hour than before, which has greatly improved the company's order turnaround time.