Last time we talked about Omni
Channel Distribution and some of the forces it is imposing on the supply chain,
particularly within the distribution centers themselves. If I was a fly on the
four walls of a DC I’d probably hear the walls screaming! The center just
wasn’t built to take on all the different roles the markets are throwing at it,
yet the survival of the business is at stake. Amazon and a few other new world
distributors are forcing their competitors to look at distribution in an
entirely different light.
I see a great many
distribution operations that were designed years ago with the 1970’s or 1980’s
style of picking modules to conveyor lines flowing to a consolidation area that
feeds shipping docks. Many of these dinosaurs were built to pick full cases
from pallet or flow rack, slap a label on the box, throw the case onto a
takeaway belt and watch it sort. Consolidation was, and still is at some DC’s,
a function of accumulating cases and building a pallet to send to a retail
store.
Then the markets began to
demand split case picking from distribution centers. DC Managers were faced with a new dynamic but
were generally pushed to stay in the same DC with the same equipment. So split
case and full case got picked in the same facility as a matter of economics.
Pushing large quantities out to a retail store was still the norm. But the retailers
started to demand smaller, more frequent deliveries as they tried to slim down
on inventory at the store. I suppose this is when the walls started screaming.
So fast-forward to the present
and the DC Manager is now faced with supplying retail stores with cases and
split case orders and figure out how
to support an ecommerce enterprise within the same four walls. Oh, and for
companies that ship ecommerce orders directly from the retail store, the DC
must now play the role of a high speed replenishment agent.
One of the newer philosophies
within material handling is the “Goods-to-Person” (GTP) method of order
fulfillment. This comes as a result of understanding that an order picker who
is doing primarily split case picking is spending most of his or her day
walking. In fact, if I’m selecting slower moving items in the DC, I could spend
75% of my time walking between A and B. That’s just completely unproductive
time and as the day wears on, I get less and less productive.
Back in the mid-1980’s I
implemented my first mini-load ASRS at a family owned fastener company in Erie,
PA. We reasoned that we could pick orders for their big contractors’ quicker,
store the product more densely and provide better customer service for their
walk-in counter business. Was I a GTP pioneer? I’d like to think so, but the
truth is that delivering product to the front end of a mini-load was just
scratching the surface of the GTP philosophy.
Today’s GTP technology is a
fine blend of software, high horsepower machinery and intelligent and ergonomic
picking stations. The software that manages the inventory in these high density
storage systems is like a WMS and WCS combined because we must know inventory
on hand, location, expiration date, etc. and must combine that with order
management, batching and sequencing to get the full value of the potential
speed of the picking system.
The technologies that use GTP
range from carousels to miniloads to shuttle based systems. Each technology
carries its own set of advantages and disadvantages and has a “sweet spot” of
application (which is where an Integrator like TriFactor comes in). Depending
upon the application, the order profile and the type of equipment, we see
picking rates from 100-1,000 picks per hour. I know, that’s a mighty big range,
but we’ll get you through it with some good data analysis and overall system
design.
I think the greatest advances
in GTP technology over the years has been at the operator picking station. Some
of the manufacturers have really done a great job of designing the front
end—some because of sheer simplicity, others because of the technology they
employ to help the picker become so productive.
Our friends at OPEX have taken
the “simplified” route by producing a picking station that is ergonomically
friendly and provides deliveries of product at the rate a person can reasonably
sustain. OPEX leaves it to the Integrator to develop the details of the “put
station”, the tote delivery and the finished order take-away (and again, that’s
where TriFactor comes in). You can read a nice article about an OPEX
implementation in the August 2013 edition of MH&L magazine.
In my blog about my winter vacation
at ProMat in Chicago, I introduced you to SSI Schaefer’s front end picking
station for GTP. The fact is Schaefer probably has more configurations of GTP
picking stations than anyone in the industry. They deploy GTP with their
Schaefer Carousel System (SCS) as well as their mini-load ASRS and they take
station design very seriously. Adam Brown at Schaefer told me that picking
efficiency goes up as the operator fatigue is reduced and so GTP is a perfect
match for high volume, high speed order fulfillment. He points to the benefit
of GTP allowing the picker to focus on the task of picking rather than on order
information. Schaefer deploys a very intelligent software solution to assist
the picker in every way possible to achieve speed and accuracy without being
distracted by paperwork or the specifics of the order being fulfilled.
So GTP is a blend of high
density intelligent storage, a fast delivery mechanism and software tools that
support high picker productivity. This is one of the technologies I see that
can support the new paradigm of order fulfillment. A good overall system
featuring GTP can be the tool a DC needs to keep up with the demands of store
replenishment as well as the peaks and valleys of ecommerce fulfillment. If we
can integrate a GTP system into a traditional DC maybe we can make the walls a
little quieter.
Thanks for listening,
Michael
