leave, you wear the suit. Then imagine you have moved into a new area and need to stock up at the local store for groceries and you don’t know where everything is. You cannot find where they keep the peanut butter, or the tinned sweet corn or where the milk isle is. Well, that was a lot like our old warehouse in Secaucus. Wouldn’t it be great if, like the laundry place, you could just have the jelly isle brought to you and you can chose the jelly you want and now your ready for the tinned sweet corn, then the sweet corn automatically is brought around and so on instead of you wondering around the place all of the items are brought to you. Well, that is essentially what we have done with the carrousel. The carrousel system allows you to put all the products in where ever it needs to be and when you ask the carrousel for that product again it brings the bin to the operator” The smart thing here is that greater efficiency is made with two tracks. The computer system knows what the next item is for order picking, so when the operative is picking an item, the second track is already swinging the bin around on the carrousel with the next item ready to pick. This system has a light display that indicates which level the bin is at, which number bin across and number of items.
Very clever stuff me thinks. 80% of orders can be dealt with in this way with the exception of part orders that include heavy items such as chemicals or unusual shapes such as a pole or a ladder.
The roller tracks are set up with the 14 order picked bins, once completed they are pushed down to the packing area ready to be processed and sent on to the customer.
It is so easy to operate. Everything is fool proof, heck, even Lee Burbidge could operate this!
The whole operative area with the computer system is on a hydraulic platform that can be raised and lowered depending on bin locations. Manual operation of the carrousel can be achieved with foot pedals.
Because 14 orders can be picked at the same time, the computer knows that if it rises to the top for items, it is picking for multiple customers in that section. When it is finished picking from the high pick point it then automatically selects all products in the lower pick points. Products are logically arranged into quadrants.
So I did. I tried at first loading the carrousel with products. Picking up the items and scanning the barcode. This would then display the image of the product onto the computer screen along with the number of items in the pack I was holding. With one click of a button the carrousel begins to swing around with the designated bin. By looking at the light panel I could see the level, and bin number with an additional lighted number that confirmed the number in the pack I was placing. The system then adds this to the itinerary for that bin location giving the exact number of products available. Picking an order, of course, was pretty much the same thing but in reverse. And so I happily packed window cleaners items with what I had learned. Instantly I could see ‘operator error’ becoming extinct with this new system, and as a matter of fact, I cannot see how an order could be picked incorrectly at all, unless you were a Sea Urchin! Because to start with, Sea Urchins don’t have arms. The system that JRC have installed is efficient, quicker and takes up far less warehouse space buying into the grand design of expansion, but it doesn’t come cheap costing many 100’s of thousands of dollars. But then, if I know Steve, he knows exactly when he will get his ROI.
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