Westcoast Warehousing Improves Picking Operations with Pick-to-Light Devices

Westcoast Warehousing is a third-party logistics provider offering warehousing, trucking, and storage solutions for retail companies throughout California and the west coast.

As business increased, the company needed to automate in order to meet the demands of their growing list of clients.

Westcoast Warehousing turned to Bastian to automate and improve their picking process.

After learning more about Westcoast Warehousing’s operation, light-directed picking was chosen as the best solution to improve productivity, reduce errors, and decrease employee training time.

Key Technologies

• Pick to light devices
• Exacta order fulfillment software

Business Challenges
Challenge #1: Westcoast Warehousing handles bulky products that require two hands to pack, which made it difficult for operators to use a large handheld barcode scanner. This led to a significant deficiency in productivity.

Challenge #2: The processing screens on the handheld scanners in the legacy system also created a language barrier for some operators, contributing to an additional loss of productivity as well as increased employee training time.

Westcoast Warehousing needed a picking solution that would improve the pick time for each SKU, while reducing error rates, operator training time, and overall labor costs.

Results
With the installation of pick to light devices and Exacta order fulfillment software, Westcoast Warehousing was able to reduce labor costs by 50 percent and nearly eliminated operator training time. The company also reduced error rates, while greatly improving productivity.