Voice efficiency meets smart pallet builds

Getting the right assortment of products out to consumers through a retail store network increasingly requires an efficient pallet-build process at the warehouse level. This is to ensure that mixed-SKU pallets, holding exactly what retail locations need, get to each location on time and undamaged, while maximizing the cubic volume of each pallet and shipment.

While much of the attention is being placed on each picking systems for e-commerce, putting in place an efficient pallet build process to replenish stores is part of the omni-channel challenge.

For Crown Paints, a United Kingdom-based manufacturer of paints and woodcare products, finding a smarter, efficient way to do pallet builds had become a challenge due to its network of decorating centers increasingly needing mixed-SKU pallets for replenishment.

Crown Paints is part of world-leading coating specialist Hempel, one of the UK’s leading manufacturers of paints. Based in Darwen, Lancashire, Crown Paints serves every sector of the decorative coatings market, promoting its paint and woodcare brands to consumer and professional audiences alike. With a manufacturing and distribution site in Darwen and a second facility in Hull, the company has a network of more than 130 Crown Decorating Centers throughout the UK and Ireland and also supplies other companies in the UK such as home improvement retailer B&Q.

Crown Paints had been using traditional handheld terminals to record and capture data to keep these centers replenished and was seeing more complexity in terms of what the centers needed, says Darryl Senior, supply chain director at Decorative Europe Hempel.

“We were seeing an increased proportion of case picks and mixed pallets in the warehouse, with more frequent, smaller deliveries to our distribution network,” says Senior. “We saw an opportunity to provide our customers with the ‘perfect pallet’ that would ultimately improve our productivity, efficiency and accuracy.”

A voice-directed solution (Körber’s Voiteq system) was put in place combined with Körber’s warehouse execution system integrated with Crown Paints’ existing warehouse management system (WMS; an SAP Warehouse Management or “WM” system). The voice system’s benefits include hands-free operation and easy-to-learn voice directives for the operators carrying out the pallet builds, with auto-cubing functionality built into the solution.

Crown Paints was using traditional handheld devices to record and capture data, which, while effective, required high levels of operator interaction using the display and keypad, consuming time when carrying out tasks like pallet builds. The company wanted a solution and devices that were easy to learn, use and interact with for operators, and it needed a solution that was fully integrated with its SAP WM solution, and could automatically calculate cubing requirements for each pallet, in keeping order data from the WMS.

“It was imperative that the voice technology could integrate easily with our existing processes,” says Nigel Balshaw, warehouse manager. “We needed to retain the accuracy levels while improving the productivity to enable us to get smaller picks sent out quicker.”

As part of the systems integration work, the warehouse execution system (WES) software capabilities were used to provide the auto-cubing functionality, based on pre-defined rules for maximum height and weight. The cubing logic also takes into consideration things like layer quantities and crushability factors of certain products to build pallets in the most efficient and safest way.

The voice solution taps into this logic to calculate the cubing requirements automatically, and direct operators through each task using spoken commands. Thus, the operation gets the speed and accuracy of voice to execute the pallet builds, with the auto-cubing functionality working in the background to properly cube-out each pallet.

In the rollout of the project, the Crown and Körber team worked closely and appointed Crown’s top operator as the project sponsor, ensuring they were always available to the Körber team throughout the pilot. Crown completed the capture of the volumetric data very early in the project, enabling them to promptly complete development to output the import file requirement, as well as providing Körber with weekly picker statistics to aid the monitoring and reporting.

To deliver the optimum result, the company had to first improve the accuracy of its master data, and this was achieved using a dimensioning and cubing solution (Cubiscan) that scanned and analyzed each case to provide the data (dimensions and weight) to feed into the WMS and voice systems.

Five operators with varying performance levels and experience were chosen for the pilot, enabling a true representation of the workforce and to ensure the solution can deliver benefits at all levels.

Crown ensured a range of customer, load and order complexities were completed. A proof-of-concept productivity target of 12% was set for the pilot, but the voice solution exceeded this, with Crown Paints recording more than 22% operational improvements, based on cans of paint picked per hour.

The flexibility to configure the pick route within the voice system produced additional gains as it enabled Crown to optimize the walk route for each picking operator. Additionally, operational spikes are now more manageable, and the system has increased visibility and allows more flexibility on responding quickly.

Finally, the metrics for the solution, based on Körber’s K.Sight Data Analysis business intelligence software, provides for visibility to near real-time performance. “We needed to know what was happening in our DC at any point in time to ensure high levels of service, and [to ensure] that product dispatch targets were being achieved,” Balshaw concludes.