Sometimes, a company upgrades its control system when the long-term maintenance costs exceed the cost of a new system. On other occasions, an upgrade lays the foundation for future growth.

Growth is what convinced Brightpoint North America to upgrade the controls and warehouse control system (WCS) on the conveyor and sortation system (Forte Industries, 513-398-2800) at its 400,000 square foot distribution center in Plainfield, Ind. There, Brightpoint handles 1½ million wireless devices per month for leading cell phone providers.

"We looked ahead and saw that we were bringing in more business and providing more value-added services all the time," says Phil Sheingold, Brightpoint's senior vice president of operations. "If we were going to stay ahead of the game, we had to get more control, more throughput and more visibility into our processes."

The existing system was already straining to keep up with demand. "Our warehouse control system is tightly integrated with our warehouse management [WMS] and freight system," says Sheingold. "We could no longer bounce information about a carton through all those systems and still run at the speeds we needed to run to get the throughput we needed."

In addition, control was distributed across a server and four PCs instead of the one PC previously used. The additional computing power allows the system to capture, store and update more information.

Beyond the new WCS, Brightpoint upgraded the programmable logic controllers (PLCs) managing the conveyors and sortation equipment. The communications network linking the PLCs was upgraded to an Ethernet network, which gave more speed and throughput.

Finally, Brightpoint added an inline scale that allows the system to capture actual carton weight, rather than rely on projected weights. That information is now sent directly to the labeling system so that shipping labels have accurate shipping weights.

The result: "We now have a system that allows us to turn on a dime and get right down to the serial number on individual cartons in large volumes," says Sheingold. "Without systems that are tightly integrated together as they are now, that would be difficult to do."