CC4Fnews

In our 3rd in a series I had the opportunity to chat with Bernell Martin, General Manager of John F. Martins Meats, Martins has been through all 3 phases of picking. Manual, Stationary Scanning and Weighing and finally Radio Frequency scanning. I believe this interview will shed light on how you can save big dollars while providing insight into the difficulties you'll face and investment required to bring these technologies to your business.

Why did you move to true RF warehouse paperless picking from a stationary scanning/weighing solution?
     "I needed the picking of orders to be more efficient."

What problems with workstation based bar code scanning were hand-held RF picking devices expected to improve for you?
     "Workers had to pick and go to the stationary station and then scan/weigh and then re-palletize. Handling product two times. Remember, we are a high catch weight processor so originally the stationary scanning was a step up from a totally manual pick. Because of the catch weight/broken case issues."

What about broken cases and RF? You used to do a lot of broken case with the scan/weigh solution.
     "It is not very efficient with RF because you don’t have a scale while you’re in the warehouse walking the aisles. We phased broken case out of our selling environment."

How did you handle the customer satisfaction issues of not offering broken case “service”?
     "We listened to our customers and went to a smaller box (less eachs inside)  for the products that really required it, we charge a little bit more for the smaller box so we can offer a better price for larger case count products." we found our full case sales increase with this move.

Did your customers object to a higher price for the smaller case?
     "No, because our customers were already paying a broken case up charge so my smaller case product was still under the broken case charge."

What do you think were the efficiencies you picked up in moving to RF picking?
     "We were able to lower our personnel cost by the count of 4 that were used for scanning, weighing and re-palletizing.  We fed those 4 guys with 8 pickers. Now the 8 pickers do all the work on one pass through the warehouse. Estimated savings of $120,000/yr. Investment payback was about 8 months.

      In addition we have a lower error rate because we get a theoretical 100% scan. Over picks and shorts have virtually been eliminated."

What advice would you give our manual picking guys to be aware of in going to bar-coding?
Editors note: 3 modes of picking in our readership markets 

1. Manual
2. Scan/weigh stations 
3. RF (Radio Frequency)

     "Make sure you have not only valid but readable bar codes. Don’t make the mistake of just because you see a bar code on a box that is an industry standard bar code and that’s a big miss on your part if you don’t check that first."

What % of your items should have valid readable bar codes to RF an effective solution?
     "In RF you need at least 85% valid, readable bar codes. If not you will have a disaster on your hands. Your software/hardware vendor should help you in that validation process."

I want to thank Bernell for sharing this experience with us.

We will be adding a 4th Newsletter to our series with some "tricks" you can implement to help get you started on bar-coding in your business.

 

 

 

< Prev		Next >