Client company:
Made in Italy excellence in fashion industry
Scope of the solution:
Pick to Light for picking and order consolidation processes.
When paper is out of fashion
The customer has a central warehouse where it manages the orders from the e-commerce channel and the restocking of the points of sale in Italy and abroad.
Working alongside the management of the well-known fashion house, critical issues emerged in the workflows which prompted a review of the processes, especially in the staging area. More specifically, it was decided to intervene on the consolidation activities after picking, facilitating the identification of the items in order to put together the orders to be sent.
The fashion company operated by dividing the orders of its customers into different picking lists, each showing only the product categories stored in a specific area of the warehouse. To reassemble the orders in their entirety and carry out the shipments, the consolidation operators used paper sheets recalling the order numbers. The use of such documents, which were applied to the products during the picking phase, however, caused a number of drawbacks, such as:
- long search times for garments
- high risk of shipping orders with incorrect or missing products
- potential loss of the documentation accompanying the product
The main inefficiencies of the process were therefore identified in the paper management of information which, not being practical and intuitive, slowed down the activities.
Lights and wearable devices dictate new trends
The KFI team, working in task force with the customer’s Operations department, proposed a paperless solution based on Electronic Shelf Labels (ESL), capable of managing a Pick by Light system.
During the picking phase, the operator applies an ESL to the product and baptizes it by associating it with the number of the order in which the garment is included. With the aid of a ProGlove wearable scanner, the hold/grip/fixing is then confirmed, in the name of maximum ergonomics and precision.
Finally, in the area intended for consolidation, the operator filters specific orders (one or more) through a tablet and determines the switching on of the ESLs only, combined with the items included in them. This allows a quick and accurate identification of products and order prioritisation, for example, based on the commercial channel or urgency.
A tailored solution
The new process has enabled a clear improvement in operations and greater ergonomics for operators, who can now carry out picking completely hands-free and recompose orders with extreme speed and precision during consolidation. This triggered an acceleration of operations, accompanied by a marked decrease in errors and training times of new operators.