Did you ever walk into a chain pharmacy or discount store wonder how in the world they can keep track of the tens of thousands of separate products they offer for sale?
Typically, central distribution centers will warehouse nearly all of their products — such as toilet paper, gum and both prescription and over-the-counter medications — and ship hundreds of different items to individual stores several times daily to replenish inventory that has been sold to customers.
But tracking the tens of thousands of individual products and keeping up with the order fills requires a lot of organization, computerized inventory control, and specialized storage equipment.
Can’t Keep Up with the Orders
For example, at the Value Drug Mart distribution center, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, products for more than 300 affiliated stores are all kept until the moment they are needed. The 85,000 square foot distribution facility includes 60,000 square feet of warehouse space that contains 18,000 separate products, including everything from bedding to pantyhose to Chap Stick.
Up until recently, employees at the facility wearing special aprons walked up and down the lengthy aisles using remote scanners to fill orders. Even though software was used to provide logical picking sequences, it still wasn’t fast enough to keep up with the demand created by individual store orders, according to Dwayne Bilawchuk, the warehouse’s operations manager.
“We couldn’t hire fast enough to keep up with the growing demand,” Bilawchuk said.
New Carousel System to the Rescue
To speed up order filling, the company replaced two zones of static shelving with six horizontal carousels integrated with pick to light technology built by Kardex Remstar, an automated storage and retrieval system manufacturer based in Westbrook, Maine, according to a news release.
Pick to light technology directs pickers to the exact cell within the horizontal carousel where the required product is located and a light tower displays the quantity to be picked. The operator simply picks the required quantity then turns to distribute them among the orders on the batch station.
The carousels were stacked and arranged in two zones of three carousels each and each zone contained an eight position batch. Two more picking stations were added later, so that a total of 10 orders could be picked at any time, Bilawchuk said.
Faster, More Efficient, and Less Space
Under the previous setup, workers could pick about 50 lines per hour, but with the new equipment, an average rate of 350 lines per hour can be picked, an increase in speed of 90%.
The new configuration also requires less labor. Instead of having three people work six hours per day to manage each zone, each horizontal carousel zone is managed by one person working only five hours. Total daily man hours were reduced from 36 hours to 10 hours, or a 72% decrease in labor costs.
Plus, the carousels require far less room than the shelving system, 1,625 square feet per level compared to 3,900 square feet per level, a space savings of 58%.
Now the distribution is more than capable of keeping up with the orders from the 300 stores it services.