Dematic and Vocollect deliver a decade of sound solutions

There have been a lot of technology innovations implemented across the supply chain over the past decade. However, few have created bottom-line savings and competitive advantage as consistently as voice-directed technology.
Since Dematic introduced voice picking to the Australasian region 10 years ago, hundreds of companies have embraced the concept, increasing productivity, accuracy and throughput, reducing labour costs and enhancing workplace safety.

Dematic now supports more than 7000 voice users in the field across a wide range of logistics applications such as 3PL, pharmaceutical, apparel, discount variety, food, beverage and ports.

The cold storage industry was the first to implement voice picking, quickly realising the productivity and OH&S benefits that hands-free, eyes-free order picking delivers.

The first applications in Australasia

Dematic’s installation for Versacold (formerly P&O Cold Storage) at its Murarrie distribution centre in Brisbane proved to be a highly successful full-case picking application. Voice picking reached New Zealand a short time later with the ‘guinea pig’ being leading vet products distributor, Masterpet.

Since their initial implementations, Versacold has rolled out voice technology to various sites, and both Versacold and Masterpet have upgraded their initial systems to new fourth-generation Vocollect hardware. Klayne Leitch, Masterpet’s general manager of logistics at the time, says the company went close to doubling productivity in split-case picking within the first six weeks of operation.

The successful application of voice picking at Masterpet demonstrated that voice picking would deliver productivity gains, reduce costs and improve workplace safety for distributors of all sizes.

After voice picking had proven its potential, high-volume retail distributors, including Metcash, Woolworths, Progressive, Coles and Foodstuffs, soon began national rollout programmes in most key distribution locations in Australia and NZ.

Voice has now established itself as the first-choice solution for both full- and split-case picking, with most users achieving productivity gains of 10–25 percent compared to radio frequency picking.

Voice outperforms RF picking

One of the best proving grounds for comparing the performance of voice picking to RF picking was at Dick Smith Electronics’ (DSE) national DC in Sydney. Dematic’s general manager of real time logistics, Nathan Taylor, says: “The logistics industry had been waiting for an application like DSE that gave us the opportunity to directly compare the performance of RF and voice picking, and the results were outstanding.”

Within its first six months of operation, Dematic’s voice picking solution had already delivered DSE with a substantially better-than-expected productivity gain of over 20 percent.

DSE’s national supply chain manager, Alan Hicks, was impressed with the results. “We knew voice picking would improve our order picking productivity, but not to the extent it has,” he says.

DSE had been using RF picking and was achieving excellent order accuracy rates of 99.7 percent, but needed to find a way to increase productivity to reduce costs and increase throughput capacity. “After seeing voice picking in operation at a number of other Dematic customer sites, we decided it would be a great fit for our application,” Mr Hicks says.

DSE budgeted on a 5–7 percent productivity improvement in picking. “It appears we were a bit conservative in our thinking,” says Mr Hicks, “because within the first month, we were already achieving a productivity improvement of about 20 percent.

“One of the concerns we had when evaluating the suitability of voice picking for our business was whether or not we could maintain the high picking accuracy we achieved with RF picking, so we thought there was little voice picking could do to improve on that,” he adds. “But I am delighted to say it did, with our accuracy rate continuing to trend upwards following the implementation of voice picking.”

Facilitating alternative order fulfilment strategies

In traditional retail DCs, the normal practice is to assemble a complete store order at a time. In a project which demonstrated the flexibility of voice picking, Dematic used the technology to facilitate a high volume ‘put’ order fulfilment system for discount variety retailer The Reject Shop at its new national DC in Melbourne.

Instead of transporting the whole order around the DC and picking products one at a time, Dematic’s voice picking and ‘put’ solution enables The Reject Shop to batch pick all of a single product for all of its store orders at the one time.

“For example, if we are processing orders for 123 stores, we may require four pallets of chocolate bars to allocate the required stock for each store,” explains the retailer’s general manager of logistics, Philip Beckett. “The voice picking system instructs the pickers to retrieve four pallets from bulk reserve storage, and those pallets are then taken to the ‘put’ zone,” he says.

The ‘put’ zone is a 4500-square-metre area of the warehouse that is broken up into sections representing the stores, with larger stores having larger areas dedicated to them than the small ones.

Directed by the voice picking system, the pickers transport the batch-picked products on pallet trucks, stopping at each store location where products are required, and ‘put’ the required quantity of product to pallets representing each individual store order. The pickers continue allocating products to each store where required until there is no more stock on the pallet truck. The pickers are then assigned another task by the voice picking system.

“We worked closely with Dematic to develop a voice picking system that matched our particular order processing requirements,” says Mr Beckett. “The fact that people can work eyes-free and with both hands is a big advantage compared to paper-based order picking,” he says.

Voice as part of NZ’s largest integrated logistics system

Voice picking was a key component of Dematic’s integrated logistics solution for EziBuy’s new DC in Palmerston North, the largest of its type in the southern hemisphere. “We chose Dematic to be our systems designer and integrator because they were the most experienced when it came to voice picking,” says EziBuy’s logistics consultant, Scott Kerr.

“The reality is that voice picking performed even better than we imagined. Our people took to it very quickly, with some of them up and working within three hours. The feedback is always the same: they all love the hands- and eyes-free picking opportunity that voice picking delivers.”

EziBuy’s integrated logistics solution won the NZ Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport’s Supply Chain Innovation Award, with chief executive Mary Devine commenting: “We are delighted to have won the award. It confirms our position at the forefront of supply chain and distribution technology, and the significant contribution we are making to the industry. The technology is revolutionary and gives us the capacity to more than double our current output. It is reducing our costs and the time it takes to distribute parcels while enhancing safety.”

The evolution of voice picking technology

“At first the idea of a computer telling a warehouse operator where to go and what to pick sounded like science fiction. However, Dematic could instantly see the benefits of hands-free, eyes-free picking in order fulfilment applications and searched the world for the best technology vendors,” says Dematic’s Nathan Taylor.

“In selecting our voice technology partner, we considered speech recognition accuracy, systems integration, industrial suitability and company stability. We found that Vocollect was the only vendor who could offer a ‘speaker-dependent solution’ – the only voice recognition technology that provides very fast and accurate speech recognition in noisy, industrial environments regardless of the user’s background or accent. Vocollect also offered direct interfaces to most leading WMS systems, negating the need for middleware or stand-alone integration software.

“Since we started working with Vocollect, we have seen many voice companies come and go in the supply chain vertical. It’s a challenging space to deliver a robust solution,” he says.

As voice-directed technology continues to mature, the cost of implementing voice picking has fallen considerably, reducing the payback period to less than twelve months in some applications. “We’ve seen some customers achieve a return on investment of less than a year for voice picking applications with anywhere from two to 200 operators per site,” adds Mr Taylor.

Advances in voice hardware and software have also increased the performance and functionality of voice picking, while reducing investment requirements. Vocollect Talkman hardware has become smaller and lighter, and now offers full wireless integration, including wireless headsets.

“Vocollect systems are also developed on open standards that allow Vocollect voice picking application software to run on third-party hardware,” adds Mr Taylor. “Users are no longer required to invest in Vocollect hardware only, as Vocollect voice picking application software can now run on LXE, Motorola or Psion Teklogix hardware.”
Asian language support has also become available, and Dematic is starting to implement voice picking across the Southeast Asia and China regions.

For further information, visit
www.dematic.com.au

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