3PL delivers picking boost

In one example, a diverse 20,000 SKU product range was being collected or delivered daily from more than 450 suppliers and being picked, allocated, palletised, and delivered to 30 stores nationwide. As a result of the revised IT process, the throughput time for this specific customer has been successfully reduced from four days to the same day. In a retail environment, where turnaround timing is business critical, this has made a huge commercial difference to our clients and gives them a real advantage in the market.

Retailers look towards logistics providers to solve problems, improve efficiencies and service, reduce risk and save money. Picking processes have become a key part of this. It is the most labour-intensive and expensive part of the warehouse journey, where the cost of order picking could be more than half of the total warehouse operating cost. 

It is not only the immediate cost to be considered. This process can also hugely affect customer satisfaction levels. For all the above reasons, we significantly invested in the technology that supports this process to provide retailers with greater efficiencies.

We take the specific circumstances of each retail partner we work with and devise a bespoke solution for them.

We identified that, through human intervention alone, we would only be able to make improvements to a certain level. We saw untapped potential in introducing an IT system that would address all of the areas of the order picking process. There’s a lot of talk about big data – and this is certainly the buzz word of the moment – but, if used intelligently, its essential to every business. Businesses need to understand and analyse big data, collate the findings, and take action on the results.

Through our IT systems, we have identified and implemented data-driven control and checking systems to improve stock file visibility and accuracy. As a result, delivery discrepancies at store have been eliminated, pick accuracy has improved to 99.5 per cent, delivery OTIF is at 100 per cent, and there is now total stock and audit trail visibility.

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What’s more, this allows us to help customers in various ways to make their own internal systems more efficient. The order picking can be so deliberate that we can load pallets in such a way that they are in the right product groups to be unloaded in the most efficient way possible when they arrive at store.

Because we assess on an item-by-item basis, we’re able to provide valuable information to our customers. We are able to calculate the total journey cost of transporting and picking each individual item on a pallet. Where the industry would usually look at a pallet as a whole, we can now drill down into the specifics of each product so that our retail customers can properly calculate and negotiate with all of their suppliers. They truly know the cost of putting each individual item on the shelf.

We now monitor every single stage of the product journey. We know every member of staff who has come into contact with the product, their interaction and the turnaround times. This level of detail is displayed on real-time dashboards that can be accessed online at all times and allows us to implement improvements on an ongoing basis.