New software suite with optional modules boosts picker effectiveness

PaulB Wholesale, a Pennsylvania-based hardware wholesaler, provides contractors, tradesmen and other businesses with a range of industrial and mechanical parts. With more than 60,000 SKUs and rapid growth, the company deployed new software to optimize processes in picking, putaway, shipping and more.

After 20 years, the limitations of the company’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution became apparent. It could only provide a text field with general inventory location information, making it difficult for employees to locate items for putaway or picking. This forced them to group similar items or brands together. After that, each employee had to remember the locations. The consequences were slow, inefficient pick paths, a high rate of errors and long training times for new staff.

When management decided to replace the ERP with a new solution (Epicor), they found it still only allowed up to six bin locations per item and no ability to track quantity per bin. A new warehouse management system (WMS; PathGuide) provides the flexibility to assign stock to multiple locations with different quantities per location.

“We chose this solution because it mapped really well to the way we wanted our receiving, putaway, picking and shipping processes to operate,” says Jim Hostetter, president of PaulB Wholesale. “We now have 99.75% accuracy rate on our shipping line count.”

The company decided to implement all of the new WMS’s functionality in a single phase, five months after our go-live with the new ERP.

“We had prepared by assigning locations to each SKU, so we were able to get up and running in both receiving and shipping from the very first day,” Hostetter says. “To help smooth out the integration process, we assigned our shipping supervisor and the warehouse manager to ensure that everyone was ready.”

PaulB implemented the WMS’s cycle count planning module, which requires only one or two man hours per day to ensure inventory for all locations is counted. Hostetter says the inventory discrepancy value stands at 0.06% for the year, one tenth of the prior year.

The company also requested a custom plug-in allows it to sell directly out of the DC. “Our business has grown by more than 10% in the last eight months,” Hostetter says, “but we’ve actually been able to reduce employee costs in receiving by 20%.”