Manual Order Picking Stalls Operation Efficiency

Used with permission from Integrated Solutions for Retailers magazine

Order picking is a daily occurrence, and the manual documentation process was wasting up to two days per product. Goonan and Pietrowski began to seek other options. The retailer's original order-picking system was an all-in-one homegrown application. For a solution, Goonan and Pietrowski looked to Blesco, an engineering firm specializing in material handling systems design, customized software development, manufacturing processes, and robotics systems. "Our DC operations team and Blesco's IT team have worked together successfully on other projects," explains Pietrowski. "So, Blesco devised a long-range plan, since they had a good idea of what we expected from an RFOP solution." The vendor worked with Goonan and Pietrowski to create a customized all-in-one order-picking solution. The software solution is written in C and is a SQL database-driven platform. The hardware includes Monarch printers and RFID (radio frequency identification) handheld scanners.

The ideal warehouse management system (WMS) operates like a well-oiled machine. Retailers strive for a seamless relationship between material storage within their DCs and processing transactions (e.g. shipping, receiving, order picking) associated with these materials. So, a manual order-picking system is anything but ideal, as it leads to countless wasted resources including turnaround time, labor, and revenue. Bob Goonan, corporate director of logistics, and Tom Pietrowski, director of logistics and EDI (electronic data interchange), at Boscov's were faced with a serious dilemma regarding the retailer's order-picking system — eliminate the manual order-picking process once and for all, or lose revenue.