Automate and manage customer requirements

Here are a few examples of how automated materials handling equipment and technology systems can work together to automate and manage some of the most common customer requirements.

By Bob Trebilcock, Editor at Large -- Modern Materials Handling, 7/15/2008

When it comes to meeting customer requirements, there are two ways to get the job done, says Tom Kozenski, vice president of product strategy for RedPrairie.

No. 1. Throw labor at the problem and lose your shirt. 

No. 2. Engineer the requirements into the workflow and do them as a matter of course.

“The first brings your operations to a grinding halt,” says Kozenski. “The second allows you to differentiate your business from the competition.”

Want to do it right? Here are a few examples of how automated materials handling equipment and technology systems can work together to automate and manage some of the most common customer requirements.

Customer requirement: Get it right or else. To the sales team, landing an order with a big box retailer is a grand slam. To the DC that suddenly has to the fill orders, it’s like facing a 100-mph fastball: Make one too many errors and you go down swinging. A pick-to-light solution is one way to maintain throughput and accuracy at the same time. Operators in a picking zone scan a label on a store-destined carton. Lights and digital displays along the shelves direct the operators to the right picking location and tell them how many items to pick to the container.

Customer requirement: Just-in-time, Just-in-sequence. Manufacturers making cereal may set up and run the same product for several shifts at a time. Computer, car and window manufacturers, on the other hand, are building customized products. For them, having the components or raw materials delivered in the same sequence as the unique items being built is a customer requirement. To get it right, WMS-directed picking and verification, often working in conjunction with a voice recognition system or a bar code scanning system, directs the picking to a tote, rack or a cart based on a bill of materials from the manufacturing center. If the item is serialized, like an air bag or an engine block, the system can capture serial numbers at the sequencing center, which saves time at the assembly line.

Customer requirement: Compliance labeling. High volume retailers require a variety of labels for every shipment. For a small customer getting a few hundred cartons a day, those labels can be applied by hand. But when you’re applying 1,000 or more labels a day, installing an automated print-and-apply process can lead to real labor savings. In this operation, a license plate bar code associated with the order is applied to a carton. The information on that label is used to sort the carton to the labeling automation system. First, an inline scale captures the weight and dimensions of the carton or package. That information is used to validate the weight of the carton and is sent to a shipping manifest software module that determines the best way to ship the item. Meanwhile, a printer automatically creates and applies a packing slip with the customer’s order information to the top of the carton. At the next printer, a shipping label is applied over top of the packing slip. From there, the carton is conveyed to the shipping sorter.

To read more about these and other solutions for meeting customer requirements, see the Information Management story in Modern’s July issue.