Hexspoor doubles productivity with digital order picking carts by Pcdata

Hexspoor has doubled the productivity of the order picking process. The fast-growing e-fulfilment company has therefore purchased five digital order picking carts from Pcdata. An additional advantage of the new order picking process is that the number of mistakes has been further reduced, while the training time for new Employees has been drastically reduced. “But our experienced order pickers have also benefited from this new method.”

Hexspoor’s origin lies in the book bindery. The family business caused a furore with Otabind, a book binding technique that keeps books open while reading. This invention resulted in Hexspoor receiving many assignments for binding work such as annual reports, catalogues, art books and cookbooks. “With annual report assignments, we increasingly also received requests to also take care of distribution. That was the beginning of our fulfilment activities,” said Susanne Bolck, who is also responsible for fulfilment activities, which has since become known as e-fulfilment. The Hexspoor customer base consists mainly of non-commercial online stores/order platforms. This includes non-profit organisations such as museums, knowledge institutions and charity organisations. “We also work as the marketing department for companies such as Kobelco, manufacturer of excavators. We process orders from the fan shop where people can buy scale models or work clothes with a logo,” Bock explained. “What distinguishes these customers from other commercial online stores, is that running of the online store is not a core activity. This means that we provide many more services than only fulfilment, such as online store design, customer service and financial reports.”

No longer efficient enough

Hexspoor has a warehouse in Boxtel for fulfilment activities with 18,000 pallet locations and 4,000 picking locations. Depending on how busy it is, 40 to 65 people work here. “The number of orders has been growing by thirty percent per year for the past ten years or so. We also need that growth. Since this concerns non-commercial online stores, the number of orders per customer is not so high. There are quite a few slow-movers in the warehouse,” said Michel Muller, Hexspoor’s operational manager. “That does not mean that speed and quality are not important. On the contrary, we also use market-based cut-off times. And if we make a mistake with an order, it may lead to a break in trust for the company or non-profit organisation in question.”

Hexspoor felt compelled to look for a new order picking system because of this growth. The existing method that was based on barcode scanning was no longer efficient enough. For example, employees used to gather picking jobs themselves. Muller: “Because the products are grouped per customer, they frequently clicked on all orders for a single customer. But when you have to deal with two hundred relatively small customers, this does not automatically result in an efficient walking route through the warehouse. Employees may have collected all the orders for a single customer such as Greenpeace, but not the orders for other customers that are in the vicinity.”

Digital order picking carts

Hexspoor looked into different order picking systems, from manual to largely mechanised solutions. They decided on PickCart, the solution by Pcdata with digital order picking carts. “We were not interested in a highly automated solution. An important part of our added value lies in our flexibility. We do not want to be limited in our process by the limited dimensions of a plastic container, for example. With the PickCarts from Pcdata we can cate for all options,” explained Bolck.

The digital order picking carts from Pcdata each counts twenty locations for twenty containers. All locations are equipped with the latest generation of displays, which shows how many units of each article must be placed in the container. A tablet at the front indicates which picking location’s turn it is. “The orders are received from the warehouse management module of our Exact ERP-package. The intelligence is located in the Pcdata’s Picking Cart Server system, however, which manages the order picking process,” said Muller.

Tablet with navigation function

Hexspoor has five order picking carts, with which twenty orders can usually be collected at the same time. When it comes to large orders, the twenty smaller containers on the carts can be exchanged for eight larger containers. When compiling batches for the order picking carts, the Pcdata system takes the different cut-off times into account. The orders with the next cut-off time are always given priority. The system then calculates which composition will lead to the shortest walking distances. A form is then printed per batch. “The orders are linked to containers by scanning the orders on the form and then pressing a button of one of the displays,” said Muller.

The order picker enjoys optimum support in the walking route. The tablet with navigation function not only shows the location number, but also the shortest route to each picking location. Once you have arrived at the location, scanning the barcode on the article is sufficient to light up the displays. Every pick can be confirmed by pressing the button on the display.

400 orders at the same time

For all one-line orders, Hexspoor has set up a different order picking process in collaboration with Pcdata. In that case, the collected articles are placed in random containers. They are then packed piece by piece and prepared for dispatch at the packing stations. “In this way, we can sometimes collect up to 400 orders at the same rime during a single tour of the warehouse,” said Muller.

Most of the picking locations are located at ground level, but for some of them, the order pickers must go higher up. Hexspoor uses one of the three high-rise lift trucks in the warehouse for this purpose. An Employee is hoisted up with the order picking cart. Muller: “In the past, Employees usually only realised that a cherry picker was needed while they were out on the route. The cherry picker then had to be fetched elsewhere, if it was available. Now the system combines all these orders into a single batch for the high-rise lift trucks.”

Productivity doubled

Bolck and Muller have consulted various suppliers of order picking carts. The choice of Pcdata was partly due to the price/quality ratio, the intelligence in the operating system and the mutual understanding. “The people from Pcdata looked at the process with us, they understood what it was all about, and they could implement what we had in mind,” Bolck declared, while pointing to cherry picker that Hexspoor uses for order picking. “Pcdata has made a special, robust cart for this purpose, and the tablet is not mounted at the front, but next to the containers. The displays are recessed into the cart so that they cannot be knocked over by the fork carriage while picking with the cherry picker.”

Productivity levels of the order pickers has doubled thanks to the Picking Carts from Pcdata. The number of picking mistakes has also decreased, as expected. “Thanks to the display on the carts, the chances of an article ending up in the wrong container are virtually eliminated,” said Muller. The new order picking process also ensures that Employees can master their work much faster. Where it used to take two or three weeks before someone achieved desired productivity levels, that can now be achieved in only a few daily sessions. It is also almost impossible to make mistakes with the digital order picking carts. Thanks to the navigation function on the tablet, they can orientate themselves at any time during the tour and find their way to the next picking location. Bolck: “Our more experienced order pickers have also benefited from the navigation function.”