Picking Up the Pieces–Smartly

Logistics Today

Written by: Roger Morton
June 2007

In the right situation, pick-to-light is helping raise overall warehouse performance.

Of technologies available to automate warehouse operations, pick-to-light enjoys success by boosting picker productivity with increased speed and accuracy of picks. That translates into better system throughput.

In general, here's how pick-to-light works: Light indicator modules are mounted on storage areas. When a product stored in the location is needed, a light flashes. The worker picks the product and then presses the light button to confirm the pick. The system is paperless, so operators don't need to take their eyes off the work at hand.

Being successful in the on-line grocery delivery business in the United States has been challenging for a number of companies over the past years. Big name food chains have tried and failed in this particular market niche. One enjoying success is Minneapolis-St. Paul's SimonDelivers (www.simondelivers.com), that started in business in 1999. Proper product picks play a major part in contributing to the company's success.

There are other reasons the company is succeeding where others have failed. "One key differentiator is that we've stayed close to our base while we figured out how to do this on-line grocery business," says the vice president of Operations, Chris Servais. "Many of the other spectacular flame-outs had multimarkets going and were losing money in all of them."

SimonDelivers serves the 3,500 square mile geographic area surrounding the Twin Cities. Most orders come in before 11 pm the prior night and are delivered during the morning, afternoon and evening hours of the next day.

The company owns its own fleet. "We've chosen to outsource things we don't feel are core competencies," explains Servais, "like fleet maintenance, tractor-trailer movements to pick up goods at our stores and to move goods from our DC to our single cross dock facility about 28 miles from here. BearingPoint hosts our web site. Those things that we deem important, such as customer service, we keep here.

The company's main grocery wholesaler is Supervalu located just nine miles from the facility. SimonDelivers buys goods from Sam's Club and Costco, catering companies, bakeries, wine and spirit purveyors and so forth. The company tries to partner with local sources. All product comes to its DC where it goes into a forward slotting situation.

"Our operation is relatively close to just in time," explains Servais. "When an order arrives we use SAP for order entry and processing, Our warehouse management system is High Jump. The orders flow down from SAP into the WMS. At the same time they flow into our UPS logistics technology software. It's here that we optimize routes. Then sequence numbers and routing is put into the WMS. At that point we create waves for picking and also print labels for our picking process. The labels are essentially tickets that go into a tote." The average customer receives about five totes in an order.

SimonDelivers uses a pick-to-light system from Lightning Pick Technologies (www.lightningpick.com) in its cooler and freezer environment. A tote comes into the zone. The shopper scans the container and the light tree illuminates those items to select. The pick is made and confirmed and the items are put into the tote. Servais claims an accuracy level in the cooler and freezer area at 99.8%.

For dry goods, Servais is examining different technologies, trying to figure out what will be optimal for the SimonDelivers business model. "We use a put-to-light system," he explains. "It's a radio frequency-enabled shopping cart that holds as many as six customer orders. As it is pushed through our dry picking module the screen on the PC mounted on the cart directs the shopper to a location to select an item. The item is picked. The shopper then scans the UPC code and on the top level of the cart is a light bar system that will be illuminated to tell the shopper in which tote the item belongs. Our accuracy level in the put-to-light area is 99.93%. The gap exists because some items like bananas don't have bar codes. The put-to-light system was developed in conjunction with Lightning Pick."

"We scan the UPC to validate the picking accuracy which is so vital for our customers," says Servais. "With 41-43 items in our grocery delivery basket, if one item needed for a recipe is missing and it causes them to go to a traditional store, we become much less important and risk losing customers. It's really important for our business to be 100% accurate."