Warehousing Operations Find Their Voice

Warehouse order-pickers at Do it Best have found their voice, and her name is Jennifer.

Jennifer is a voice-directed picking and warehouse logistics solution that enables warehouse associates to communicate with the system through a headset and mobile computer. Voice-directed picking is starting to supplant traditional paper-based picking methods and it also is gaining traction on other protocols like RFID and pick-to-light scanning.

Do It Best was “very proud of the accuracy we had in a manual environment, but a driver of this was to improve our accuracy and our productivity,” says John Snider, vice president of logistics for the Fort Wayne, Ind.-based member-owned hardware, lumber and building materials buying cooperative, which has 4,100 stores in the United States and 47 other countries.

Do It Best uses Jennifer to accommodate the more than 65,000 SKUs stocked in eight retail service centers around the country, achieving a 96.8 percent fill rate. Products run the gamut from building materials, doors and windows to lawn and garden, pet supplies and electrical and plumbing fixtures.

In rolling out the system, the company installed Jennifer at four service centers and phased it in over two months to the remaining four locations, training more than 300 staff in the process. By the end of the rollout, associates were surpassing previous productivity and accuracy rates, according to Snider.

“As a part of our strategic plan, we are constantly taking a look at how we improve the efficiency of the retail service centers,” Snider says. “We’ve had a multi-year process aimed at improving the efficiency of our warehouse operations.”

Jennifer is now at the core of those efforts. The developer of the technology, Pittsburgh-based Lucas Systems, has delivered voice-directed distribution center solutions to clients like C&S Wholesale Grocers, CVS/pharmacy, Kraft Nabisco and OfficeMax.

Lucas describes Jennifer as a platform that “uses information from your host or warehouse management system to hold a two-way conversation with warehouse workers, instructing them what to do and verifying and responding to the information associates speak back.”

Jeff Slevin, Lucas Systems’ COO, says Jennifer is “rather intuitive from a user’s perspective. We’ve heard it described as kind of like having a supervisor walk behind a worker and tell them what to do and where to go.”

By means of a headset, warehouse center workers can control the interaction with the system – asking Jennifer to speak faster or slower, softer or louder. Additionally, associates can ask the system for help or information as they do their jobs without having to stop to call on a supervisor.

Using a person’s name for the system “was a way in which we could kind of break down some of those technology barriers and … perhaps give a more human element to it rather than being a scary technology [that DC staff is] being asked to use,” Slevin says.

Jennifer is able to direct voice-picking and order selection, receiving, put-away/stocking, let-down/replenishment, loading, returned-goods processing, equipment inspection and quality control/audit. It integrates with a number of warehouse management packages, including those from Manhattan Associates, SAP, RedPrairie, Oracle, Infor and Microsoft.