Smart Warehouse
Welcome to the future of warehouse management and your new competitive advantage
“The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time.”
— Henry Ford
You haven’t become an industry leader because you’ve adopted me-too tools and processes. You know a “follow the leader” approach only leaves you back of the pack, competing for less lucrative deals at lower margins.
At Portable Intelligence our mission is to create a competitive advantage for our customers, allowing them to innovate and build upon their leadership position. This is why, we created the Smart Warehouse.
The Smart Warehouse
The Smart Warehouse is a curated group of complementary technologies that work in tandem with your ERP or warehouse management system. It addresses the blind spots associated with the two key technologies used to manage inventories today – wireless and barcoding.
While these technologies are proven for marking and tracking materials they lack the ability to manage and direct the people moving those materials. This is the crux of the problem – how and when a worker performs a material movement is at their discretion. As a result, there is a wide productivity gap between workers and in general a massive underutilization of labor.
The Smart Warehouse addresses this waste by empowering companies with the means to control the labor force that moves the inventory.
With Smart Warehouse you can,
Increase picking rates by
Increase inventory turns by
Increase order accuracy by
The Smart Warehouse is comprised of these technologies which can be deployed individually or combined.
Location Based Services
Imagine what would happen if organizations had the ability to track warehouse workers as they moved through the facility at a level of precision 10x better than standard GPS signals? This would change the way warehouses are run, no different than how GPS revolutionized the trucking, taxi, and delivery industries. The two key benefits of LBS are it will allow you to direct workers to specific bin locations areas ensuring optimal inventory turns and dynamically reallocate tasks based on their location in the facility. LBS addresses ‘the missing link” in your supply chain – worker visibility and control, leading to a new era in productivity and throughput.
Vision Plus
Vision based systems have been deployed successfully for security applications, quality control on high speed conveyor lines, and robotic assembly lines. With our partner, Artemis Vision, a leader in machine vision system integration, we’re bringing this technology to the supply chain. Vision Plus is a touchless inventory solution that eliminates the need to manually scan barcodes. For example, we deployed Vision Plus at an existing customer facility to improve their shipment accuracy. Their former process required hand scanning of the pallets as they were loaded onto the trailers. With cameras mounted next to each shipping door, Vision Plus, automatically reads the pallet labels as the loads are transferred onto the trailer. This loading action triggers a warehouse pick, order ship transaction, and image capture. Our customer not only improved shipping accuracy but they eliminated a pick scan in the warehouse and plus they can now provide proof of shipment. Accuracy is up and so is throughput and accountability.
Vision Plus works with existing barcode labels with little or no changes and can be used for inbound shipments, finished goods receiving, shipping, and inventory transfers. When you consider that a manual scan takes up to 4 seconds to perform and your workers are doing this hundreds if not thousands of times per day – Vision Plus is a game changer.
TED™ – Task Engine Distributor
The ‘brains’ of the Smart Warehouse is TED our task engine distributor. TED sets your labor standards and determines if you have enough resources to complete the day’s missions or warehouse tasks. It can make decisions such as which orders are to be picked first, which orders are priority, or how best to allocate the tasks over the course of a day.
TED will also monitor and rank employees. A priority or rush order from a key customer can be automatically assigned to a highly productive employee. As TED constantly monitors the position of employees in the warehouse, it might allocate based on their proximity to the SKU, or organize groups of employees to fill an order based on their productivity or location.
TED can monitor if an order is slow in being filled and re-allocate resources dynamically based on any criteria you choose. This is but a few of the things that TED can do to maximize employee productivity, stock turns and pick accuracy.