Distributor Locks Down Handheld Equipment

Cheney Brothers, a foodservice distributor with locations in Orlando, Ocala and Riviera Beach, Fla., was looking for a solution to organize, store and track the company’s Radio Frequency (RF) scanner equipment.

After installing an automated locker system, the company improved accountability, cut costs and boosted productivity.

Before the new lockers, scanners were often lost - even accidentally thrown in the trash.

This meant managers frequently had to drop what they were doing to search the 525,000-square-foot Ocala DC.

According to Ignacio Estupinan, operation systems coordinator, it might take three days to track them down, so there were extra scanners just to keep people working.

“People used a different scanner every day, so they were careless with them, and it caused a lot of damage, a lot of repairs and a lot of finger-pointing.”

The company had managed its RF devices out of a locked equipment room. An RF technician arrived 30 minutes before each shift to organize all the devices and verify their IDs. Then came the daily “lineup.”

Operators each waited at least five minutes to check out their equipment and sign the daily log. At the end of each shift, they all lined up again for check-in.

This lineup repeated three times a day with 150 employees. That process consumed roughly 15 RF tech hours and more than 125 operator hours each week.

The new automated locker system from Apex Supply Chain Technologies, manages 100 voice-enabled scanners and headsets - enough to assign one per operator - and 25 two-way radios.

Each scanner or radio is assigned to a specific compartment and a specific operator. The check-in and check-out processes now take less than one minute per employee, and the system records each transaction.

The company has saved $28,080 in annual technician labor and $143,000 in annual operator savings, the productivity equivalent of three full-time operators.

In the first nine months, not a single scanner had to be sent out for repair, and Cheney Brothers expects zero annual costs for replacing lost or missing scanners.

Based on the success at Ocala, the company plans to incorporate a similar solution at a new DC under construction in Punta Gorda.

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