Press Release Body: Central Pet, a national pet food distributor, was ready to automate its manual warehouse operations. With pet food and supply sales soaring, the company decided to meet its logistical challenges by installing an automated picking solution.
"What we had been using was inefficient, pretty much pushing a cart down an aisle--no scanners, no pick-to-light, no pick-to-voice," says Jeff May, operations manager for Central Pet, which is a business unit of Walnut Creek, CA-based Central Garden and Pet Co. "The WCS is more focused on the activities within the warehouse relating to order fulfillment and shipping. Determining the best place to perform each distinct level of activity will avoid any conflict," says Jerry List, vice president of QC Software Inc., (www.qcsoftware.com) a warehouse control systems provider in Cincinnati.
There are numerous immediate benefits, including:
Flexibility in equipment purchase decisions: The ability to tie together equipment from multiple suppliers allows firms like Central Pet to purchase the best equipment for the facility instead of choosing all the equipment from a single supplier.
Real-time operation: Because the WCS interacts with the MHE controllers in real-time, it instantly reacts to status information from the material handling equipment, making adjustments to maintain an efficient product flow.
System redundancy: Since the WCS is always located at the warehouse, it can maintain warehouse operations in the event that the connection between the warehouse and the corporate WMS/ERP system goes down.
Eliminates islands of automation: The WCS provides the middleware to connect a firm's WMS/ERP to the material handling equipment via a single interface. This provides a single point of monitoring and control for the entire warehouse.
Dynamic pick allocation: The WCS can a make a "last minute" determination based on the current activity and operational status. This dynamic pick allocation helps balance the load on the system and increases productivity.
Cartonization: By analyzing the make-up of each order, the WCS selects the smallest possible size container, reducing shipping and dunnage costs.
Quality control: Customers are highly frustrated when the wrong product was shipped. Distributors incur the additional cost of the return, as well as the wrath of the customer. A WCS can help eliminate this problem in some industries by providing real-time order verification ensuring that the carton contents are correct for that order using an in-line scale. The WCS knows the expected weight of each order based on the items picked. Boxes outside of a user-defined tolerance can be diverted for manual quality control inspection.
Reduce theft and fraud: The WCS can help manage not only the product in the warehouse to reduce theft, but also help uncover and eliminate fraud.
Tracking: The real-time aspect of the WCS provides order status so that a company can track a product anytime, anywhere in the system.
Shipping: With a WCS, companies can dynamically change the ship method at the time of shipping, ensuring the most cost-effective method is used.
System diagnostics and problem resolution: The WCS can consolidate operational statistics and diagnostics across the entire warehouse and provide improved visibility of equipment status and order tracking.
QC Software, Inc. www.qcsoftware.com Jerry List JerryList@qcsoftware.com (513) 469-1424
2012
