Vaasan Ltd has successfully implemented a Distrib Put to Light WMS solution in their externally operated terminal in Jyväskylä.

The cooperation between Vaasan, a leading Finnish bakery company, and Pcdata already dates back to 2004, when a national rollout of the Distrib Pick to Light solution was conducted to 14 bakeries. These systems have been up and running ever since, however, significant strategic and operational changes have forced Vaasan to re-organise their distribution network. This resulted in some major changes, where one of the changes included the transfer of customer picking activities from one of their existing bakeries to an outsourced distribution centre in the town of Jyväskylä, serving customers in this Central Finnish region. Originally this distribution centre served as a crossdock hub for finished picked customer orders, but only recently the terminal took over the actual picking of customer orders.

While Vaasan had a lot of experience with the Distrib Pick to Light systems, they were very careful in evaluating the system-options and processes for this new terminal. In the end, the decision was made to implement a Distrib Put to Light system in this facility, as this would offer them more flexibility, better fill rates of partial basket orders and would enable them to start picking customer orders much earlier. This Put to Light solution is much more suitable in the new situation, where multiple (bulk) shipments per day are being received and need to be distributed over individual store orders.

Following a detailed site analysis, the system was installed early February. Although new staff needed to be hired and trained to work in the distribution terminal and operate the system, not a single customer order was shipped late or otherwise negatively affected. The transition from the existing picking area into the new facility went without any problem and even after just 1 week of operation, operators are already almost achieving the targeted performance.

The Distrib Put to Light system consists of Pcdata’s standard Distrib software suite and includes additional modules such as Distrib Performance Manager and Distrib Performance Dashboard, which enables Vaasan and the management of the distribution terminal to effectively schedule labour and evaluate actual picking performance, both real-time and afterwards.

Mr Tommi Wilenius, Logistics Manager at Vaasan commented; “We had an excellent and intensive cooperation with Pcdata during the project and I have to say that I’m very pleased with the new solution for our customer picking, although we had a very tight timetable with this project.”

About Vaasan Ltd;

Following an acquisition in June 2015, Vaasan are now part of the international bakery group Lantmännen Unibake which produces fresh and frozen bread products for the retail and food service sectors. Next to the existing Distrib Pick to Light and new Put to Light installations in Finland, other subsidiaries of the Group such as Vilniaus Duona from Lithuania and Hanzas Maiznicas from Latvia are also standardized on the Distrib Pick to Light solution. Lantmännen Unibake is a part of the Swedish agricultural cooperative Lantmännen – owned by 25 000 Swedish farmers and one of the Europe’s largest groups within the bioenergy, machinery, agriculture and food sector.

More information on; www.vaasan.fi/en/

If you want to know if Put to Light would be suitable for your warehouse, please feel free to contact us!