Systems Bulletin

Now is the time to prepare for your peak season!

Making a Difference for your peak season

Is it too early to start thinking about filling orders for your peak season? Probably not! Even if everything went well the last go around, you’ve likely already spent some time looking at your fulfillment processes to identify potential improvements. But what about your material handling equipment? Especially those picking and sorting systems that might have been a limiting factor during your past holiday crunch? Your first thought could well be that it’s already too late to make any upgrades on the equipment side for this year. Not so if you’re looking into automating your picking process. In fact, right now is the best time of year to be looking at both Perfect Pick and Sure Sort from OPEX.

Plan now and benefit in the fourth quarter!

How can that be given traditional lead times? It’s only a matter of 4 to 6 months from initial evaluation until go-live with OPEX equipment. Sure, there is an advantage schedule-wise with OPEX systems being manufactured in the U.S. but that 4 to 6 months also allows ten weeks for setup, install and test of equipment before startup. Suddenly, buying new picking and sorting equipment for the upcoming season takes on a whole new light, doesn’t it? As well it should! Labor availability is unlikely to improve anytime soon. There are also considerations of high order fulfillment accuracy and faster order turn-around times. Perfect Pick and Sure Sort address all three factors, which individually (let alone combined) can have a huge impact on your holiday success.

Labor, especially temp labor, is tough to come by already. Everyone knows the story of hiring 100 temps on Monday and only having 20 still there by Friday. Is that any way to run an e-commerce business? Not this year (or ever, for that matter!) Consider the value of automation. A general rule of thumb for manual picking is 60 to 70 lines per hour per person. With Perfect Pick, a conservative figure is 400 single lines per hour per person. Sure Sort’s performance improvement is even more impressive. One person can sort up to 2,400 items an hour (plus two pack out operators) compared to twelve people sorting to put walls, achieving the same throughput. (Oh, did anyone mention that $15 an hour is either already here or not that far off in most places?)

Labor requirements in the primary pick area fell by nearly 40% as picking accuracy soared. Last year, Siggins and OPEX helped Guitar Center install two aisles of Perfect Pick in mid-October. Labor requirements in the primary pick area fell by nearly 40% as picking accuracy soared. Quite simply, it is almost impossible to pick the wrong item given Perfect Pick’s process safeguards. However, while we’ve been talking about peak season, Perfect Pick and Sure Sort can easily scale back to normal throughput. The challenge isn’t to simply design a system built for peak season but to design for standard throughput with the ability to handle peaks easily.

Source: Gary Forger, former editor of Modern Materials Handling Magazine