Voice-directed system creates improvements in hospital supply chain

Sentara Healthcare is a 12-hospital integrated healthcare system with more than 4,500 care sites including nursing homes, assisted living facilities and physician offices throughout Virginia and North Carolina. The company’s central DC in Chesapeake recently replaced its RF picking process with a voice-directed solution, resulting in more efficient and accurate case and piece picking.

The facility uses a variety of picking processes, including full cases to conveyors or pallet jacks, and piece picking to totes on conveyors or picking carts. The warehouse management system (WMS) creates waves of orders for picking, and a single hospital’s order typically includes products from every area in the DC. Prior to voice, orders were picked using an RF-based picking process running on handheld mobile computers. Although the WMS pre-planned the number of totes needed for each order in each area, the process was not optimized across picking areas.

“A facility might only order three items, and we would pick them in three different areas in three separate totes,” explains Robert Saunders, director of materials management at Sentara. “We would send three totes to the customer, even if those three items could fit in a single tote.”

With the new voice-directed solution (Lucas Systems, lucasware.com), Sentara kept its existing RF infrastructure and made no WMS changes. Items are picked into a tote in the cart pick area before being delivered to the fast pick module for additional items. “Instead of getting two separate totes, that customer gets one,” Saunders says. “That might not sound like a big deal, but we used to deliver two or three loads per night to some hospitals, and in some cases we have cut that down to one and a half loads.”

Saunders estimates the new system has saved more than $150,000 in reduced fuel and driver costs in a little more than a year. Within weeks, picking errors were cut in half, new employee training was reduced from weeks to days, and productivity surged. Within weeks of the picking go-live, users in the sortation area were trained and brought onto voice.

“Because we knew voice would increase our picking productivity, we were concerned that sortation would become a bottleneck,” Saunders says. “So we knew we needed tools to improve efficiency downstream as well.”

Among workers in the DC, picking productivity has improved between 40% and 50%, from an average case-picking rate of 65 cases per hour to as much as 140 to 150 cases per hour.