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Can you hear me now?

Corporate Express Canada switches from paper to voice-directed picking

Handling 12,000 SKUs and shipping 45,000 items total daily from its eight distribution centers, Corporate Express Canada teams up with Dematic to implement a state-of-the-art paperless picking solution.

by Jim McMahon

Many distribution centers are still picking product the old fashioned way, with paper, and not just small DCs either — some very large corporations have yet to switch to paperless picking. For many years Corporate Express picked with paper, but recently re-designed picking operations within all of its eight distribution centers in Canada.

For a company moving millions of dollars worth of office supplies every day through its combined Canadian DCs, the decision to make the change to paperless was no small one, and it had to be executed with minimal interference to the operation of its DCs.

Upgrading to paperless picking does not necessarily mean having to fully automate the operation with sortation and conveying equipment. For Corporate Express Canada, only one of its eight DCs was outfitted with a streamlined conveying and sortation system, but all facilities were redesigned to incorporate state-of-the-art picking.

The change involved moving to a sophisticated voice-directed picking technology with a unique capability completely — an operational picking platform spanning the operation from picking and inventory control to customer-level transactions through the ERP. The system, developed by Dematic, put the company on the forefront of picking technology, increased labor-hour picking throughput by 300 percent and reduced picking errors throughout its eight Canadian DCs.

The need for speed
Corporate Express, Inc. is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Buhrmann, NV, an international business services and distribution group. Its North American operations have more than 200 facilities, including 38 distribution centers employing 10,775 people.

Corporate Express Canada’s facilities require a bilingual picking system in both English and French. Combined, the Canadian DCs handle 12,000 SKUs and ship 10,000 orders daily encompassing 45,000 items.

“We were looking at productivity enhancements, capacity growth and standardization of several functions within the operation,” says Ed Meyer, vice president operations, Corporate Express Canada. “The company has been experiencing very rapid growth in Canada for some time now and our distribution capability is critical to the company’s promise to deliver exactly what the customer orders, and deliver it on time, complete and correct.”

Voice picking
“Two major changes in operation were planned for our DCs,” continues Meyer. “One was to shift seven of our eight facilities from conveyors and sortation over to picking carts. The other was to implement voice picking technology into all of our DCs, as we were operating with paper picking and looking for more efficient picking.”

“With the pick carts put into place we are able to pick 30 to 40 orders at a time on a cart and take it right to the loading dock,” Meyer says, “This has allowed us to improve our flexibility and capacity to deal with orders in the DCs. With 12,000 SKUs, this has proved to be an extremely workable system for us.”

“We already had success with Dematic pick-to-voice in our United States DCs, so we decided to mirror that in Canada,” Meyer explains. “We asked Dematic to design a voice picking system, and they gave us a solution centered around their PickDirector.”

PickDirector
PickDirector is a Windows and SQL database product that is able to uniquely operate voice picking technology, pick-to-light systems, put-to-light systems and RF based picking solutions all in a single platform.

The system takes order information directly from the Corporate Express ERP system and delivers it to the picker. With no paperwork, operators pick with both hands instead of just one. Tasks such as reading, writing, and searching for stock locations are eliminated.

Pickers wear a portable, belt-mounted speech recognition device and a headset. The terminal communicates to the host computer via standard RF. This picking method eliminates pick lists; operators simply listen, speak and scan.

The Corporate Express warehouses have picking processes taking place for replenishment, case lots and individual items. These are now all controlled by one overall software program, designed by Dematic, that enables a single-screen view of the entire picking operation within the warehouse.

PickDirector capabilities include wave processing, intelligent batching to improve productivity, and the ability to sort orders by priority, destination, customer and other scenarios. It supports a wide range of picking hardware and can easily integrate with routing and sortation systems to increase efficiency and track containers and their contents.

Zone routing
In the Mississauga facility, where Corporate Express is still using conveyors and sortation equipment, PickDirector also controls a system called Zone Routing which allows it to control the movement of specific cartons for special handling like quality assurance and priority routing.

The system is linked with the ERP to automatically route an order to a number of different pick stations to be fulfilled before it releases the order to the shipping sorter. This is fully interwoven with the picking system, which gives a higher degree of efficiency in movement and accuracy across the entire operation.

“Traditionally in zone routing, the conveyer control system assumes that if the carton went to the correct zone, the order has been picked,” says Timothy Post, Technology specialist with Dematic. “The carton is thrown back on the conveyer regardless of whether the pick was actually done or not, and it does not return to the zone. This can result in an incomplete order.”

The system at Corporate Express will send that carton into the zone again, and it will keep sending it to the zone until the conveyer system gets the message that all of the picks have been made correctly. This results in much higher fulfillment accuracy.

The system can also do on-the-fly processing. If an order has an exception, such as a short pick, it gets processed to an exception location. Traditional systems will not necessarily have that on a short pick. Normally, an order would have to go through an audit or be manually handled. The Corporate Express system automatically introduces a divert command to redirect it based on the position of the carton.

The paperless system prevents misreads and mistakes in data entry, reducing picking errors and the need for time-consuming quality control tasks.

The switchover from paper to pick-to-voice for each DC was done over the period of just one weekend. On a Friday that DC would be picking on paper. On the following Monday, it would be on a voice system. The entire project, upgrading eight separate DCs, was begun in June 2006 and completed by December.

“Our increases in productivity have knocked the ball out of the park compared to what we had before,” Meyer says. “With paper picking we were doing 55 to 60 items per hour. Within two to three days of implementation, we had pickers averaging about 70 items per hour, and some doing up to 150 items per hour — almost three times faster than with paper.

“Our goal is to get pickers up to 170 to 200 items hourly, and we are confident we can reach this with the new system. Throughput, taking into consideration all employees in the warehouse, is up from approximately 25 lines-per-hour to about 32 lines. This represents a 50 percent increase in overall production.”

For information on Dematic Corporation, please visit the Web site: www.dematic.us.

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