Bringing order fulfillment issues to heel

Warehouse-level order fulfillment is a crucial process for Pet Food Experts (PFE), a distributor of pet supply products. Order filling at its DCs sits right at the intersection of two of the company’s biggest operational priorities: ensuring a high service level to its customers, and keeping its warehouse associates engaged and empowered with digital tools.

Improved order fulfillment is why a few years ago the Cumberland, R.I.-based company decided to move away from paper-based order picking and look for a system that could speed up and exert digital control.

Related Webcast: Pet Food Experts’ Lydia Voice Solution is Best in Show

PFE’s history as a family-owned company goes back to 1936. It started small under the Baker family, whose third-generation still owns the company. In 1989, the company became the exclusive distributor for southern New England for the Iams Company, leading to substantial growth.

With the appointment of Michael Baker as president and CEO in 2003, PFE entered a time of rapid growth and expansion, and found they could not continue providing high-quality service without investing in technology. They implemented a warehouse management system (WMS), which provided inventory control software and ordering management processes, but the picking process remained paper-based, using manifest pick sheets generated from WMS data.

By 2017, company leadership knew it needed a solution for its now six DCs. The goals were picking productivity, fewer errors, as well as supporting workforce engagement and retention.

PFE wanted a digital means of picking orders and liked the accuracy of bar code scanning with handhelds, but liked the speed and workforce engagement qualities of voice as well its accuracy checks. After examining the options, it selected a voice solution (Ehrhardt Partner Group). EPG’s Lydia Voice solution is implemented at four of PFE’s DCs.

According to PFE’s chief operating officer James Bettencourt, the solution has been an effective order fulfillment accelerator on top of the WMS (Infor). While paper pick lists generated from the WMS worked adequately for a time, with added growth, reliance on paper manifest sheets slowed down the crucial filling of warehouse orders and didn’t provide online visibility.

“We needed a system…that would give us efficiencies, give us fewer touches, and more importantly, give us control and enable us to see what’s going on at each and every step of the way, and that’s where voice picking came in,“ Bettencourt says.

The voice system directs warehouse associates on order picking tasks with simple voice verifications of tasks completed to ensure accuracy. Additionally, the solution includes a middleware layer known as EPG PickManager Server, which creates a bi-directional flow of data between the WMS and the voice system, which enables immediate line-item updates back to WMS. Through this integration foundation, analytics allow for greater visibility on the status of active and scheduled orders.

Also importantly for PFE, a voice-directed, digital user interface appeals to today’s workforce, who’ve grown up with smart phones and digital devices. As Bettencourt sums up, “with the new labor force, [the systems we put in place] have to be digital, easy to use, easy to train on, and enable them to do their jobs really, really well.”

Employee onboarding time has been reduced to one week or less compared to previous paper methods, which took two to three weeks to get a new employee fully trained.

For comfort and hand-free system use, rather than using a belt-worn device that communicates with a voice headset, PFE opted for EPG’s VoiceWear vests, a lightweight, wearable vest with digital device, microphone and speakers built in. This keeps the workers hands free for tasks and supports good ergonomics.

PFE first deployed Lydia Voice at its Cumberland, R.I., DC in July 2017, which proved out the value of the solution, and followed that up with a second deployment at its DC in Tacoma, Wash., in May 2019. A third deployment took place at its DC in Pennsylvania in October 2019, and last year during the pandemic, thanks to remote implementation techniques, the system was installed and deployed at PFE’s warehouse in Colorado, making that four DCs currently up and running with the Cloud-based voice solution.

Deploying the system under EPG’s Cloud simplified remote implementation, but it’s the functionality of the system itself—including voice picking directives, voice verification cues for accuracy, and bi-directional integration with WMS, and analytics and reports, which have brought the operational benefits. “Teaming up with Lydia Voice has enabled us to pick orders 38% faster, and our order accuracy is averaging 99.9% since implementation,” says Bettencourt.

While PFE has increased worker pay since the pandemic hit, which helps with retention, the voice solution is credited with helping the company improve retention by 15% to 20% at the DCs where it’s been deployed. Mainly it helps workers stay engaged, but it also provides better analytics on productivity, which helps management structure a more effective incentive program.

PFE plans to roll out Lydia Voice to its additional DCs to support further growth, which accelerated during the pandemic. As Bettencourt explains, what was once a paper-based process and was increasingly proving a hindrance to fast and accurate order fulfillment, is now a digital, voice-enabled process that keeps PFE’s workforce engaged, and speeds up and improves the process.

“To me, [the voice solution] is about taking care of our employees, providing a solution that works for them, that works for our business, and ultimately results in the customer getting an order accurate and fast,” Bettencourt adds.