When 99.5% isn't Good Enough

Griffiths’ four sales representatives take orders by EDI, phone or fax. The sheer volume of goods picked and packed, the similarity of part numbers, and pressure to get orders out the door, all combined to produce these mistakes on a daily basis.

“Our error rate was about 200 lines wrong per month out of 40,000,” says Managing Director Peter Griffiths. “It wasn’t bad, but nevertheless that’s 200 things you have to fix up.”

You’d think an accuracy rate above 99% would be considered pretty good, but Griffiths Equipment wants to maintain its leading place in the highly competitive auto parts & accessories business.

Fixing up a botched order meant either retrieving the incorrect shipment, or getting the customer to send it back, re-picking, packing and despatching, freight-free. The extra costs (about $25 per order) and wasted time were bad enough for Griffiths Equipment, but customer relations suffered too. One customer began imposing a financial penalty of $140 per error. This is becoming a more common practice in the goods & services sector.

“The cost is immaterial, really,” Peter says. “I think the point is the time involved and the desire to be 100% accurate.”

Griffiths Equipment needed something that would slash those errors by ensuring that its warehouse staff picked the correct items each time. A demonstration of Greentree’s Mobile Warehouse Operations Suite convinced them that they’d found the answer.

Look - no wires!

Greentree’s Mobile Warehouse Operations suite provides warehouse and customer service staff all the tools they need to be able to efficiently and accurately fulfil customer orders and sharpen inventory management processes, to save time and money.

With a wireless network installed in its warehouse (through Greentree-approved supplier Mobico), Griffiths equipped its warehouse staff with rugged hand-held devices that not only allow live picking of goods as orders come in, but also scan barcodes on each item, or the boxes containing them, to ensure the correct items are picked every time.

When new goods arrive at Griffiths’ warehouse, they can be placed according to size or popularity. “The fastest moving goods go nearest to the packing area and the slowest moving goods go the furthest away,” Peter explains, “so it’s all about the shortest amount of walking you can do to pick goods.”

When an order is entered or received via EDI, it appears on Greentree’s Workflow desktop, which is visible to all staff. The order then shows up on the hand-held device, indicating where the items concerned are located. The warehouse staff can then pick the items for packing by following the shortest route, indicated by the device. Not only do they spend less time walking around, but the built-in barcode scanner tells them if they’ve picked the correct item or not.

“Most of the time they work it out in the warehouse; they scan it, the scanner beeps, tells them they’ve picked the wrong one,” says Todd Walter, Customer Services. “It’s picking up errors from our suppliers as well – so now we’re advising them that they need to fix their barcodes.”

Seamless scanning

Another benefit of the scanners has been their ability to scan the different barcodes for inner and outer packages. Some products come in ‘outer’ cartons, which may contain as many as 40 individual items, each in its own separate pack. The ‘outer’ and ‘inner’ packs each have different barcodes; the scanner can read the ‘outer’ barcode and tell the warehouse staff how many items are in the carton.

“Previously you might have to physically count each item in the box, and also the box might not have even had a quantity on it – just a part number,” Peter says, “so it’s made our system much more structured, and all our suppliers have to put the right information on a carton.”

Training the staff to use the mobile devices took less than 30 minutes, and everyone is happy to see time saved and mistakes reduced. It’s estimated that in just a month of use, the scanners have cut the errors by up to 80%, and Todd’s ultimate goal is to see them cut to zero. The next plan is to implement live stock-taking using the scanners so the inventory is checked on a daily basis. Greentree Mobile Warehouse already has that function; it’s just a matter of turning it on and training staff to use it.

Supporting a business leader

Griffiths Equipment Ltd was something of a guinea pig for Greentree Mobile, which was still in its beta testing stage when implemented.

“We had very good direct service from Greentree. They worked quickly to resolve problems, which has been appreciated,” Peter says.

“I think our business is a leader in its field because we’re nimble on our feet,” Peter concludes. “We’re generally first to market with new automotive accessories – we want to deliver new products to our customers quickly. Things are good – the market is tough, but we’re doing well.”