With 400 employees busy making upholstered chairs, we have one entering the warehouse every 30 seconds!
They need to be grouped by shipment, to prevent loading from becoming a search nightmare and keeping the trucks waiting...
Our customer had grown with the unexpected growth in popularity of its 1,2 and 3-seater recliners (sofas), constantly adjusting its production lines. A victim of its own success, it had grown by 435% in 3 years.
After moving into a huge building with storage capacity for several thousand chairs, he realized that he had a new problem: the chairs were going out faster and faster, so that the warehouse placement handlers no longer had time to group them together and manually manage their placement. They were literally running between the warehouse and the production line exit, placing the chairs wherever they could. As a result, loading times soared, with shipping managers taking an exponentially longer time to find the right chairs to load onto the right trucks.
Eventually, the warehouse was full to 95%, with several trucks queuing for hours to collect their chairs. The customer then had to assign 6 additional warehouse managers to avoid catastrophe, resulting in over 200,000$ in annual costs.
Our solution
The customer would send us a file containing a list of the serial numbers of the chairs per shipping truck. A barcode label was applied by an employee to each box in which the chairs were packed. Our laser read the barcode from the label on the box as it travelled along the outfeed conveyor.
Our algorithm, which took several warehouse factors into account, reserved the space required so that all the chairs going on the same truck could be grouped together as much as possible. The software determined exactly where to place each wheelchair in front of the laser and printed a location label in 1/2 second, which was then placed on the box, giving a perfectly clear instruction as to where to store-stack the wheelchair (1, 2 or 3 places) in the warehouse, to eliminate search time when loading the trucks.
Benefits
Thanks to our software, the 6 employees who had been hired in surplus were reassigned to the production floor. This resulted in savings of over 575,000$ per year in salaries and the consequences of errors and logistical headaches. Our customer's largest customer confirmed a new multi-million dollar order thanks to the reduction in shipping times.
