Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Good afternoon. My name is Harold Nielson. I am the distribution manager for the Kimble
Chase Rockwood location. Kimble Chase Life Science and Research Products is a manufacturer
of culture tubes, pharmaceutical testing vials and pipettes. The facility operates a manufacturing
facility and distribution center that is a total of 236,000 square feet under roof.
The facility operates at 7 days, 24 hours. The productivity level of shipping is 108
million pieces per month.
The Kimble Chase Group was looking at warehouse management systems for quite a long time.
The current situation was that we had just a paper process and an MRP system but no way
to communicate back with the transactions or flow of products.
Prior to having this system, it could take 2 days to get finished goods into inventory
for them to be able to be allocated and picked for a customer's order.
The current system puts inventory into our MRP within an hour. As soon as it is removed
from the manufacturing facility and brought to the floor, that inventory is captured in
our system.
Hello. My name is Joe Jones and I am the IS manager for Kimble Chase Rockwood. At the
beginning of the RFID process, we knew that a lot of changes would have to take place
at the facility. First and foremost was how to set up the facility for a wireless infrastructure.
So we actually had coordinated through SATO to do an on-site survey. They told us how
many wireless access points we would need, laid out our warehouse, gave us the locations
of the access points and then we used that once we installed the wireless infrastructure.
The operators will bring a pallet up to the portal to process through iTRAK. They will
let the RFID system scan the pallet and then they will go and validate their pick ticket
information to what iTRAK system has posted. If the information is correct, then they will
go ahead and click the accept button. At that point it applies that inventory against the
customer's order, it prints out a pallet label and a packing slip, an individual packing
slip for each pallet. And, at the end of picking everything, they should get a shipment complete
prompt from the iTRAK system that lets them know that the entire order has been successfully
completed.
When the carrier comes to pickup the freight, the first step is to scan the customer information
which is the customer ID number and the ship to zip code and it will populate the shipping
information, scan the pallet ID and, at this point, the system should say that the shipment
is complete and the operator can go ahead and load the pallet onto the truck.
iTRAK system works so well that if the wrong products are on the pallet or the wrong products
are mixed on the pallet from manufacturing when they come down, the system will error
out and force you to correct the problem and give you a description of what the problem
is that is found.
The inventory accuracy prior to the iTRAK's RFID system was pretty poor. Nearly every
order that was picked, there would be an issue with insufficient stock being in that location
when we would go to pull the orders. After putting the system in and it getting up and
running, we have no situations where we have insufficient stock when we go to a bin. Our
cycle count accuracy of finished goods is at 99 percent.
We worked together with SATO to conquer some of the problems we had with the close proximity
of RFID labels so we designed the system to work both with RFID and bar code scanning.
That way we didn't have scatter or pickup of labels we were not trying to target while
we were putting away products or picking customer orders, loading customer orders.
We make private label and we make our product here. Our private label customers chose not
to have labels placed on the outside of their packaging, so we place an RFID label inside
of the carton. It is inconspicuous; we can still read everything, scan it thru the system
and process it normally.
The host integration part of the project was key. So by working with SATO's integration
staff, we were able to take the transactions from the host system, the iTRAK system, and
pass them on to our ERP system via XML uploads. The XML uploads were smooth, were easy to
track and really helped us in this situation.
One of the biggest benefits of this entire project from my standpoint was the single
turnkey solution. From a technology standpoint, you want to be able to handle all you stuff
with one vendor if possible. SATO gave us that possibility. They handled the printers,
they handled the iTRAK software development, they also handled the interface uploads to
our ERP system. I have dealt with other vendors in the past and a lot of the other vendors
in the past have different outsourcing that they do for each step. By having SATO with
one in-house source, I only had one area that I had to focus on and that was for SATO to
get the details accomplished on the schedule that we had to accomplish them in.
Well, we were very pleased with the service that we have and the solution that we have
in operation right now. We look forward to possibly growing this technology in to other
locations in this company. We are very happy with the SATO organization and glad to be
in partnership with them.