Consumer Electronics Manufacturer Streamlines Productivity with Horizontal Carousels
Consumer Electronics Manufacturer Streamlines Productivity with Horizontal Carousels
Challenge
Challenge
As a manufacturer of products for broadband cable and satellite TV operators, cabling and telephony systems contractors, and building contractors, among others, this company offers one of the largest electronics product portfolios.
Constantly developing new, advanced products, they are a leader in the design, engineering and manufacturing of high quality communication products. Looking to concentrate their open stock area into a smaller footprint, the company turned to White Intelligent Storage Solutions.
This installment was necessary so that they could efficiently move into a new warehouse along with four of their sister companies. The company was also looking for a solution to manage their large number of similar looking items since pickers would often grab an adjacent item by mistake.
Solution
Solution
Since the company often picks individual pieces, inner cartons, or full cases, the Horizontal carousels were the perfect fit for the company’s products. Equipped with vertical Lightree III systems, aligned with every shelf level on their Horizontal Carousel, operators where shown where to pick and how much to pick from the carousel to providing the company the highest levels of productivity and accuracy.
Each module also had a large, one-inch, dual color, 10 character alphanumeric display plus two direction arrows.
The horizontal Sortbar III shows the operator where to place a product to complete an order, increasing accuracy and picking speed. A light activates to indicate the tote position on the workstation. Each module has a large one-inch, dual color, 6 character alphanumeric display.
The company uses the Warehouse Librarian Software ™ which is a flexible and scalable warehouse control application that can be used to perform all tasks associated with carousel bulk storage management such as picking, stocking, counting, and inventory tracking. It runs on the latest Microsoft Windows™ operating systems, and features a SQL database as the heart of the system. Warehouse Librarian is designed to eliminate the paperwork normally found in non-automated warehouse systems and is a perfect fit for their particular installation.
Their operators need only to pick or store items as directed by the system. When an operator confirms that a task has been completed, the software’s positive acknowledgement feature reports the activity to the host, keeping the valuable inventory information up to date.
The company also utilizes JD Edwards ERP software to manage the business side of the solution. Warehouse Librarian Software ™ provides the interface to JD Edwards which allows full real time control in the warehouse to manage inventory, cycle counting, RF, receiving, and consolidation.
Results
Results
Now with a total of 5 White horizontal carousel systems on the floor the company have realized greater productivity with increased pick rates, improved inventory control and dramatically reduced floor space requirements. By installing the carousel systems, the company was able to save over 30% space.
Not only that, but they have also reduced the number of picking personnel from 9 to 2 for loose piece orders while simultaneously reducing the time to pick a day’s worth of orders by approximately 3 hours.
When speaking about the notable benefits of White Intelligent Storage Solutions, the IT Manager of the company said, “The increased productivity we get from the White carousels has really benefited our business – a major improvement in our material handlingoperations. And the service and support we receive from White Systems is outstanding.”
