Focus on Supply Chain Management

Leanway

文章来自APICS e-NEWS Vol. 5, No. 18

本文分析了现实中的一个现象，揭示了其趋势和提出了一个研究命题。但俺觉得“最后一公里”或许更复杂也更重要，UPS对送货员的极其详细且不厌其烦培训和规定或许是行业先行者的智慧所系。

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Pieces, Please Traditionally, a company could measure how well its business was doing by how many cases it had shipped in a week (or a month, or a year). Now, instead of cases, companies may ship units. What used to be 300 cases, now might equal 15,000 units.

Stores such as Wal-Mart have pushed the demand for individual items, called eaches. Retailers don’t want to break down items from cases and store them, incurring inventory costs and headaches.

Eaches also got a boost from Internet storefronts, such as Amazon.com. When ordering online, people don’t request things like books by the case; they order one book at a time. When that book is ordered, someone goes to Amazon’s warehouse and picks the correct book.

How does your company make sure it has the correct book, screw, or bottle of suntan lotion to fulfill an order? Are you sending your pickers into a labyrinth of shelves and bins, armed only with a piece of paper? There is a different way.

"To survive the competition that is out there, companies are starting to invest in automated logistics systems," says Dave Simon, who does international sales and U.S. marketing for FKI Logistex. Simon’s company provides automated materials handling solutions to a variety of customers.

FKI Logistex, like its competitors, offers a wide variety of products that can help companies with their small-piece picking. For example, its vertical lift modules (VLMs) come with a number of options, including a laser device that will point directly to the item that should be picked, an adjustable counter that corresponds to the picker’s height, and a tilt feature, which makes it easier for pickers to reach things on the back of the tray.

And those are just the options available for VLMs. Horizontal carousels offer a whole new array of choices.

"The usual process is that you start to talk to a customer about automation," says Simon. "No one product is right for everybody."

Maybe your company isn’t ready to implement that kind of materials handling solution. There are other options to upgrade shelving systems. One of the most common examples is pick to light, which uses software to light up the next pick on the shelf and display the quantity to pick. Other options for picking equipment include bar-code scanners, radio frequency carts, voice-directed systems, and automated conveyor and sorting systems.

"We try to find the best match of technologies to try to service everything, not just the high-volume product," says Darin Danelski, president of Innovative Picking Technologies, Inc.

With all the choices out there, chances are your company could benefit from upgrading its picking equipment.

—Jennifer Proctor, managing editor, APICS magazine