Doing More with Less
Productivity and Space improvements
SmartMoves WX, Warehouse Execution software by Tech King Operations has been implemented by St Elizabeth Regional Health Services, Lafayette, IN to solve their productivity and space problems.
Difficult choices
Faced with a move to new facilities, St Elizabeth found 3 major difficulties
o Their store room will be only half the previous size
o The supplies delivery locations (within the hospital) will be twice the previous distance.
o Materials Management Department does not want to add more employees.
As with many companies today, there was a pressing need to do more-with-less.
They asked two obvious questions.
1. How do we get enough supplies into half the space?
2. How do we increase productivity enough to allow more time for deliveries without adding employees?
The space and productivity issues were both solved by Tech King Operations implementing the new WX (Warehouse Execution) component of SmartMoves WCS (Warehouse Control System) software and SmartPicks LDP (Light Directed Picking) hardware. Utilizing 4 automatic horizontal storage and retrieval carousels along with the light directed batch picking software and hardware and handheld RF computers for non-carousel picks,
St Elizabeth Health Services now picks orders in less than half the time and half the space.
The previous operation had employees picking orders and staging them on carts for delivery to the various locations throughout the hospital. They would each walk up and down the shelving rows picking one order at a time from a paper pick-list. Once the orders were completed the same employees load the picked items onto carts and push them to the supplies locations on the various floors of the facility.
Since interfacing SmartMoves WX with the facilities' WMS (Warehouse Management System), one picker can now pick a batch of up to 10 orders at once. The lines items of 10 orders are interleaved into one electronic "pick-list" and processed as one order. SmartMoves WX software prepositions the carousels for each upcoming pick while the SmartPicks digital displays in front of each carousel tell the picker the location and quantity to pick. The digital displays on the "order matrix" tell the picker which order tote gets the picked item. There is no waiting or walking up and down the aisles or searching for a particular SKU. Additional benefits of greater accuracy and accountability are also achieved through the use of the new SmartMoves WX warehouse execution software.
For more information about SmartMoves Warehouse Execution software and Tech King Operations contact Dan VanHooser at 513-833-1594 or visit www.tech-king.net
