Green Rabbit deploys voice

When Green Rabbit was founded in 2009 by cousins Greg Balestrieri and Joe Melville, it was known as Candy.com, as the cousins had one distinct goal: to become “the candy store of the world.”

The founders’ e-commerce instincts ultimately paid off, and business grew quickly.

“It requires specialized expertise to successfully fulfill perishable goods,” Balestrieri says. Realizing this requirement extended to other industries, they decided to create a cold chain fulfillment service for companies with temperature-sensitive products, and they opted to rebrand the company Green Rabbit.

Business continued to increase, leading the founders to experience a shortage of space, along with general production slowdowns. In response, the company’s management team knew it had to investigate ways to improve efficiencies and invest in warehouse automation to achieve a variety of strategic business growth goals.

Green Rabbit selected a warehouse automation designer and integrator to define, design and implement warehouse automation and software technologies for two new DCs. In addition, it would upgrade operations in the company’s existing DC.

The designer and integrator first conducted an engineering study to determine which warehouse automation solutions and technologies would meet its aggressive growth plans, while yielding a strong ROI.

It deployed RDS voice-directed pick, pack and ship automation at three of Green Rabbit’s facilities, while obtaining a one- to two-day delivery window across the United States (and providing for room to increase capacity.

In addition, the company saw order throughput nearly triple and order accuracy rise to 99.99%.

“Since the implementation of the RDS software, we’ve been able to scale more than 60% year-over-year, which has allowed us to grow multiple facilities and increase throughput from 8,000 orders a day to upward of 24,000 orders a day,” says Rob Cedrone, director of operations at Green Rabbit. “We’ve at least doubled output in the original Massachusetts facility with the same headcount and have nearly tripled output in other facilities as business has grown.”

Operator decision making has been eliminated, while built-in lot and sell-by dates have captured validation across Green Rabbit’s operation.

“Now processing several million transactions per year and tens of thousands of shipments per day at multiple facilities, the system has proven its reliability with no delays,” Balestrieri explains.

Numina Group
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