Tag: wms

PSI Logistics GmbH is again delivering an upgrade for the PSIwms warehouse management system to the Weiss Chemie + Technik GmbH & Co. KG. With the current functionalities, the ergonomics, efficiency and the possibilities for analysing the KPIs of the processes in the warehouse can be further improved.

At the production facility in Haiger Weiss Chemie + Technik produces more than 6,300 tonnes of adhesives, 950 tonnes of cleansers and 650,000 sq m of sandwich panels annually. The PSIwms system, implemented as early as 2000, controls the processes through dynamic storage space conversion with a number of pallets on a triple-euro storage space, route-optimised order picking as well as needs-based material provision and on-time transportation of the finished goods. By means of the cross-location functionality, the multi-level processes of the production stations including staging areas and stocks are also reproduced.

With the new upgrade, new functionalities such as activity tracking can be used to log activities and KPIs in the warehouse to record process times for in-depth analysis and optimisation of processes. In addition, the PSI Click Design provides better flexibility in customising user interfaces.

PSIwms Release 2021 offers easier goods receipt and placement. In addition, the dashboard improves ergonomics on mobile touch devices, which can be used to visualise warehouse information on all common devices via the cloud.

The PSI Group develops its own software products for optimising the flow of energy and materials for utilities (energy grids, energy trading, public transport) and industry (metals production, automotive, mechanical engineering, logistics). PSI was founded in 1969 and employs more than 2,100 people worldwide.

Körber is working with Toolstation, one of Britain’s fastest-growing suppliers of tools, accessories and building supplies to the trade, home improvers and self-builders, to evolve its multichannel capabilities to meet consumer demands. This includes enhancing processes in its Redditch distribution centre while supporting Toolstation’s expanding network of stores.

Toolstation is experiencing significant growth in online and retail orders. As a result, the company outgrew its paper-based processes – leading to a lack of visibility and productivity constraints for the workforce. With its vast range of products, even though broken into warehouse ‘logic zones’, Toolstation was challenged to simultaneously manage smaller, sometimes single, e-commerce orders along with bulk distributions for its stores.

The company needed a solution to increase workforce productivity, simplify picking, increase capacity within its current warehouse and integrate with its existing, proprietary order management system that linked all of its stores. Kӧrber made this possible.

“At Toolstation, our customers and colleagues are at the heart of everything we do. As our business continues to rapidly grow and expand, the needs and expectations of our customers continue to develop and change, be it product range, speed of delivery or convenience. It was really important for us to streamline our processes to make picking easier for our colleagues, improve visibility of workload across our distribution centre and to improve the quality of delivery to our customers.

“When we turned to Körber, we were looking to reduce our in-house complexities to develop a superior solution that would work in our current operation and with our existing IT infrastructure,” said Jim Gowland, Head of Distribution at Toolstation.

Working with Toolstation, Körber designed a solution that uses a warehouse execution system (WES) combined with voice technology to facilitate process change, driving efficiency and accuracy.

The WES builds the basis of operational improvements: It links orders geographically in the warehouse to limit the walk time of each operator. Innovative multi-order picking logic enables picking for multiple customers. Furthermore, product information is used to maximise the fill of each delivery unit, reducing transportation costs as well as amplifying operators’ picking tours.

The voice system improves the pickers’ experience in a different way. Workers hear and verbally confirm instructions step by step via headset. This ensures process conformity, improves productivity and reduces errors. The complexity of Toolstation’s product range also makes onboarding new pickers challenging. Voice technology has a proven record of significantly reducing training time. Due to the accuracy of voice picking, goods-in and put-away of orders delivered to stores will also be significantly improved, freeing up employees’ time for more valuable customer tasks.

A further benefit of the two linked systems is the WES’ ability to log and track each voice-directed action and provide near real-time visibility via a suite of standard dashboards. This gives the warehouse management team true insight into the operation.

“At Körber, we review operations to not only understand the ’what you do’ but more importantly ’the why’,” said Anton du Preez, Chief Sales Officer Software EME, Körber Business Area Supply Chain. “We work with our customers to identify how we can improve a process, and then consider the best technology fit. Along with decades of successful deployments worldwide, we have a wide range of solutions covering the entire supply chain at our disposal, as the complexities in today’s supply chain mean there is no ’one-size-fits-all‘ solution.

“The solution we will be implementing at Toolstation goes to show how much potential an existing warehouse has if the right type of technology is applied.”

Leading temperature-controlled storage and distribution business Reed Boardall has been a long-standing user of the Empirica warehouse management system from Chess Logistics Technology. The two companies have worked together for over a quarter of a century, during which time Reed Boardall has grown to become one of the largest businesses of its type in the UK.

“Over the years as the business has grown and we have added new customers and new lines, the WMS has always been a constant that has allowed us to make those changes,” says Andrew Baldwin, Managing Director, Reed Boardall Cold Storage. “We have always been able to support the business with Chess.”

The scale of operations at Reed Boardall is undeniable. Its 55-acre facility in Boroughbridge, Yorkshire is the biggest in Europe and the company is the UK’s largest single-site frozen food consolidator, delivering more than 12,000 pallets a day to food service and retail customers across the UK with its fleet of almost 200 refrigerated vehicles.

A 10,200 sq m extension to one of the seven state-of-the-art cold store chambers, completed in early 2021, brought Reed Boardall’s total capacity to 168,000 pallets of frozen produce at any one time. Adding this much capacity could, on the face of it, have significant implications for the WMS. In reality, however, all that had changed from a WMS perspective was the number of locations and it was easy to add these to the application’s database. Empirica is scalable to meet evolving demands like this and the number of locations it can manage is effectively limitless.

The extension would represent a major undertaking at the best of times but it was completed on schedule against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic that has presented challenges to all supply chain businesses. Reed Boardall is no exception and the business has experienced changes to its operations since March 2020. In particular, the lockdown resulted in fewer case-based orders from food service operators, many of which have been closed, but increased the full-pallet demands of retailers, most of whom have seen their sales increase. People have to eat, after all, and with limited alternatives available most have chosen to do so at home.

From a WMS perspective changes in order profiles presented few challenges. The system is designed to cope with all types of order and has the flexibility to respond and adapt to dynamic demands in real time.

“The processes have not changed much over the last 12 months from a business perspective,” says Andrew Baldwin. “Things that have changed have been outside our control but the WMS has always been the backbone and it’s always been there.”

It could be argued that the ability to adapt to fluctuating demands and ensure all orders are completed efficiently and delivered at the time required by the customer is the core requirement from a modern WMS. This is perhaps illustrated by the increasing shift by retailers to day-one-for-day-two delivery models over day-one-for-day-three or weekly deliveries. By definition, this shortens the time available to plan, assemble and despatch an order and the WMS has to be able to prioritise operations accordingly. Empirica achieves this by allowing users to set a wide range of parameters that the system uses to ensure all orders in progress are picked at the best time throughout each 24-hour cycle and despatched to meet expected delivery schedules.

Effective stock rotation is a key consideration in this process. Reed Boardall typically picks stock on a strict best before date basis as this allows for tight stock control with good end user availability and shelf life. This presents no problems for the WMS as sell-by date is one of many parameters that can be used to ensure one case or pallet is prioritised over another.

“The system allows us to do anything we need,” says Andrew Baldwin. “With strict best before day rotation, for example, Chess allows us to manipulate the system to do that.”

Cases and pallets in a cold store are little different to those found in other warehouses from a WMS perspective. Nevertheless, food supply tends to be reactive and there are seasonal factors which affect demand. Warm weather always leads to an increase in orders for party and barbeque food as well as ice cream. These demands can arise quickly and the WMS needs to cope. In addition, during 2020, the lockdown meant the usual dip in sales over summer when people go abroad for holidays did not occur. Towards the end of the year, like many warehouses, capacity was right on the limit as stock from the EU was brought in early to help avoid potential supply chain issues caused by the uncertainty over Brexit. Despite these challenges it was business as usual at Reed Boardall.

“Over the years as we have come across an issue – often driven by a customer – that changes how we operate, Chess has been able to step up,” says Andrew Baldwin. “We have covered pretty much every eventuality since we have been working with Chess.”

Changes in consumer shopping habits have led to food companies needing a more responsive logistics partner that is able to reliably consolidate products in order to cost-effectively deliver little and often. Reed Boardall’s single site business model has proved ideal for this. With support from key suppliers such as Chess the company has been able to grow and evolve its business to meet the ever-changing needs of the market.

Online Swiss beauty vendor haar-shop.ch AG significantly improved order fulfilment productivity by over 40% and increased its warehouse utilisation rate by more than one-third by using Descartes’ cloud-based ecommerce warehouse management solution (WMS).

As haar-shop.ch’s online business grew, it quickly became clear that manual fulfilment processes needed to be modernised. Its existing inventory management system did not offer advanced warehouse management capabilities such as “chaotic warehousing,” which speeds the put away process and maximises warehouse space utilisation.

Employee processing and warehouse capacity quickly reached their limits. “We had sorted the shelves by brand, so every employee was required to memorise the product location in the warehouse,” said Markus Stoller, Head of IT at haar-shop.ch. “Our warehouse operations were inefficient as a result, and we couldn’t implement multi-order picking to improve employee productivity.”

With the Descartes solution, haar-shop.ch not only optimised the use of warehouse space, but also significantly increased shipping speed. “Our goals were exceeded. We gained over 35% storage space and increased productivity in order fulfilment by more than 40%,” Stoller explained.

“By automating fulfilment processes, manual steps are reduced, which initiated massive changes in daily routines, but definitely paid off quickly. In fact, the benefits we had aimed for were achieved in only two weeks!”

Part of Descartes’ ecommerce solution suite, the Descartes Ecommerce WMS solution helps direct-to-consumer brands, ecommerce retailers, and traditional retailers rapidly scale in combination with providing a remarkable customer experience. The solution helps ensure that clients can ship on time, ship the right items, do not oversell existing inventory, and have full transparency into warehouse operations.

The Descartes Ecommerce WMS solution is pre-integrated to major e-commerce platforms like Shopify, Magento or Shopware to accelerate implementation and time to value. Order information is automatically available to be executed via mobile-driven multi-order pick-and-pack strategies and then fed into parcel shipment systems.

“The Descartes solution can help haar-shop.ch’s warehouse logistics processes scale along with their online store’s sales growth. We’re very proud to be able to support haar-shop.ch in offering its customers an outstanding shopping and delivery experience,” said Dirk Haschke, VP & General Manager, Ecommerce at Descartes. “For companies with eCommerce warehouse operations, excellence in order fulfilment is a key element for sustainable, successful business growth.”