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Warehouse Workflow Optimization through RF Devices


Overview
A global distributor and supply chain partner to industrial and commercial users of electronic components and computer products, the client is also a leading services and solutions provider. It offers services such as materials planning, programming and assembly, inventory management, online supply chain tools, and design support. Its worldwide customer base consists of over 150,000 original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), contract manufacturers, and commercial customers.

Business Need
The company had huge warehouses, where picking of goods was being done manually, with each picker getting tickets that told him what to pick. Consequently, time-to-process and efficiency suffered, making the process flow poor and picker efficiency tracking virtually impossible. The client wanted to optimize the picking of goods based on three key criteria namely, available inventory, the size of the order and individual picker skill levels.

Challenges and Requirements
The size of operations was the biggest challenge before Infosys, which had to:
  • Increase the efficiency of the picking process. To do this, Infosys had to study and understand the existing processes and then design optimized algorithms that would improve them significantly.
  • Eliminate 'cherry picking,' which meant that pickers picked up the easiest or lightest loads. Cherry picking made the organization's workflow inefficient as it was based on picker convenience and not business requirement.
  • Reduce order completion time. To achieve this, skills of individual pickers had to be matched against pending orders.
  • Reprogram orders to ensure business-driven prioritization. Orders needed to be reprogrammed periodically to ensure that the most important one was handled first, calling for advanced coding skills.
  • Create accountability with tracking. Efficiency was to be ensured with a well-organized tracking system, enabling supervisors to know the amount of work being performed by the pickers working under them.

Infosys Role
The 15-member Infosys team utilized its Global Delivery Model and ensured project completion within one year. Proper documentation of the complex workflows even before reaching the client's site ensured that the project got off to a quick start. The team maintained the speed of deliverables until completion.

To ensure that the system was efficient, the Infosys team used RF (Radio Frequency) devices, which would be carried by the pickers, instead of paper tickets. The RF device dynamically determined the next pick location, confirmed it with the main computer and tell the picker the quantity of the product to be picked. When needed, it also informed the picker of quality checks and special handling.

The system algorithms matches the picker competency with skill requirement for picking equipment, by storing information about each picker. When a new item to be picked was added, the system would calculate the priority of the pick and the location of the product with respect to the current position of the picker. This ensured that the picker closest to the product would pick it up, thus reducing picking time.

In addition, the system also reprioritized picks at regular intervals based on the type of order, date for fulfillment, and the time taken for shipping.

Supervisors benefited greatly from this system as they could monitor, at a glance, the status of all the pickers reporting to them, including current location, and the time for fulfilling picks. This monitoring enabled the client to make its staff accountable and work hard to fulfill transactions in a timely manner. The company could also track the completion status of individual orders.

Developing the challenging algorithms and ensuring their smooth integration was possible because the Infosys team first perfected a single flow and then applied it to other areas. Code was released in the fastest possible manner to enable testing. The technical team pointed out difficulties in the early stages of design, enabling the client to facilitate changes to business processes to ensure smoother operations.

Benefits and Outcome
The Infosys solution delivered the following benefits:
  • Processing time for orders was reduced by 30%.
  • Regular reprioritizations ensured that system continued to improve efficiency as warehousing requirement change out time
  • Fast high quality implementation enabled client to achieve results rapidly
  • Supervisory monitoring enabled better staff performance management
  • The Infosys team delivered a solution with a defect level of 0.01 as against the SEI CMM Level 5 recommended defect rate of below 0.1. The increased robustness further improved the client's business operations.
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