The Walls Are Screaming

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