Voice Picking Solutions

Companies continually strive to extract costs from their supply chains. Warehouse professionals in particular are constantly challenged to reduce labor costs,improve productivity and increase order accuracy while streamlining overall operational costs.

As one of the warehouse’s most labour-intensive functions, order picking is a key area that companies focus on for automating processes with new technologies.

Although traditional order picking solutions—paper labels, RF scanning and pick-to-light—have been successful in making the process more efficient and accurate, increased competition and the demand for even greater levels of service continue to raise expectations for even greater efficiencies and improvements.

Enter voice technology—specifically speech recognition and speech synthesis combined on a wearable wireless computer connected real-time to the warehouse management system (WMS). When analyzing the order picking process, most errors occur due to mispicks, creating a significant cost through returns.

Cumbersome handheld equipment or paper labels associated with traditional picking methods require more time to fill orders.

Employee turnover, language barriers and seasonal increases in part-time employees reduce an organization’s ability to maintain high productivity, all resulting in a less-than-efficient picking operation.

Through direct communication with the WMS, labour management system (LMS) or host system, voice technology solutions facilitate simple, natural communication between order pickers and the system to speed the process and accuracy of order fulfillment.

Companies are finding that voice-directed warehouse solutions can improve operations and drive costs from the supply chain.

Some are:

• Voice-directed warehouse order selection has been found to be more accurate and more productive than both handheld scanning and
paper/label based methods.

• One company achieved a reduction of 50% in returns after implementing voice, which resulted in substantial savings in the first year.

• The same company noted that additional physical moves required by scanning led to inaccuracies in picking orders. After converting to voice, shortages dropped by 11% and mispicks decreased by over 25%.

• Labour and training benefit directly from voice technology solutions.

• By applying voice solutions to perform a range of assignments across their warehouse, companies can further extend the economic and business benefits.

Voice-directed warehouse solutions enable companies to achieve efficiencies that translate into measurable operational gains over traditional picking solutions.

Users report increases in productivity and accuracy, as well as a direct payback to the bottom line—all significant benefits that cannot be ignored—proving the value of the voice implementation. Whether the goal is reduced labour costs or greater operational efficiency, or both, voice technology has the ability to rapidly deliver a positive operational contribution to warehousing and distribution operations.