London Drugs Cures Its Picking Ills

By: Maida Napolitano, Contributing Editor; Logistics Management

For every company adding voice to its operation for the first time, Bob Heaney, senior research analyst for research firm Aberdeen Group, reports that there are four to five companies already using voice for picking that are planning to roll it out to new areas such as replenishment and putaway. For voice providers, there’s even better news. David Krebs, senior director specializing in mobile and wireless for VDC Research, sees the voice market performing well as we roll into 2011. Though he attributes much of this growth to “pent-up demand among existing users for upgrades and expansions,” he sees an increasing share of the market driven by opportunities in emerging and underpenetrated regional and country markets, specifically in Europe and Asia.

This expansion into other workflows and penetration into global markets is further testament of voice technology’s positive impact on warehouse operations and overall accuracy improvements. Because of its hands-and-eyes-free operation, Krebs points out that picking productivity with voice typically improves by 20 percent or more. “Order picking accuracy of well-designed and deployed voice solutions typically reaches, if not exceeds, one error per thousand picks (99.9 percent accuracy), says Krebs.”

It’s this quest for increased order picking accuracy that drove Canadian retailer London Drugs from error prone picking with paper to near-perfect picking with voice. In the next few pages, we witness this retailer’s successful transition into voice not only to pursue the perfect order, but also to realize clear savings by eliminating paper labels while improving picker productivity.

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