Where do you see that you can support the increase in productivity, not only from what is now known as Voice Picking?
For more than 20 years Honeywell has worked in Voice Picking as its fundamental pillar of productivity. Nowadays we understand that, although this principle placed us at the top of the technologies in general, it is a paradigm, because it is believed today that we can execute in a more efficient way our assortment process based on everything that concerns the voice technology within the distribution centers.
Why is it a Paradigm?
I return a little to understand the way we see technology before we understand it. This comes in recognition of the operation based on process flows.
What is a workflow? Understood as the study of the operational aspects of the logistics activity, it is the beginning of everything within the Distribution Center: how the tasks are structured, how they are carried out, what their correlative order is, how they are synchronized, how the information that supports the tasks and how the compliance with them is monitored. Thus, the workflows within the distribution center are based on the study of them from the processes of entry, storage, cyclical counting, inventory, assortment etc.
For us at Honeywell, the principle of taking the voice to a Distribution Center, goes beyond the assortment or the Picking by Voice, is to understand all the workflows that arise in the distribution center and support them with voice technology. This is something we call the Talking Store.
The Talking Store
Many refer to the Talking Warehouse as the voice-enabled store and, in short, are the different areas in which voice technology can be applied to achieve greater business performance. This is the next generation in the management of merchandise handling in the distribution center and warehouse.
Today, many managers are reviewing the processes in their warehouse and are betting on voice technology as an enabler of productivity. In a talking store, for example, there are fewer alphanumeric keyboards and bar code scanning is only a secondary support. The argument in favor of voice technology is simple: quantitatively, the voice provides measurable business value.
What other things can we do, leveraging the success and experience of using the Voice in a Distribution Center?
Understanding that the principle of everything is the workflow, looking at the supply chain, we could say that we are in a previous link to what is the demand of the market. What happens if we go to the beginning of the chain? This is where we have the raw material, in this case who we are going to satisfy is not the market, but the production lines and finally the raw material warehouse, which has process flows that resemble those of the distribution center. finished product.
Another aspect is that in order to meet the demand for the products to be delivered, it is required that the transport is in good condition, which is known as an inspection and maintenance plan inside the talking warehouse. And in the face of retail, to be able to supply the gondola or the product that is not found, we can also leverage the principle of the Voice to supply products, take note of the non-existent product, make price changes in the gondola, among others process flows.
These are to mention, some of the uses and applications that we see in order to optimize distribution centers with Voice technology, to convert them into Talking Warehouse.
