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.
