Voice Picking in Accellos One Warehouse: Introduction

In facing today’s harsh economic realities, warehouse managers are increasingly looking to:

• Improve the agility of their distribution centers
• Improve labor efficiency
• Improve visibility to warehouse activities and inventory and order status
• Improve throughput

This is the first of a series of articles that will look at voice picking as a way of achieving these goals using Accellos One Warehouse. The series also includes voice picking ROI and voice picking workflow.

With voice picking in Accellos One Warehouse, your warehouse staff has a better ability to focus on order selection rather than reading a screen, pick list, or purchase order; keying in data, or juggling both product and an input device. Depending on your facility, voice picking is often faster and easier than RF and much more effective than manual data entry.

Voice picking can Improve labor efficiency. Voice unshackles your employees’ hands and eyes from their RF guns, increasing efficiency and safety. Further, training time can be reduced by as much as 50 percent – an important consideration for growing facilities or warehouses that employ seasonal workers.

Customers using Vocollect have experienced performance gains as high as 30 percent and accuracy improvements as high as 60 to 80 percent. More on-time and accurate deliveries because of improved DC and warehouse efficiencies ensure greater customer satisfaction.

Where Does Voice Picking Fit?

There are a wide variety of warehouse operations that have successfully used voice picking to improve their efficiency and accuracy:

• Temperature-controlled warehouses want to reduce the amount of time their workers are exposed to extreme temperatures. 
• Pharmaceutical companies and C-store suppliers often require quick turn-around for their customers.
• Food distributors may want to move perishables out quickly. 
• Suppliers to retail stores have stringent accuracy needs.
• Regional DCs are under increased volume pressures.
• Medical and equipment distributors are held to strict quality of service.
• Everyone wants to improve accuracy and speed.

In the next article in the series, we’ll look at voice picking ROI.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009 at 3:06 pm and is filed under Warehouse. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.