Order-fulfillment strategies: Slotting engine boosts warehouse efficiency
By Manufacturing Business Technology Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 2/15/2008 12:45:00 PM
Sterling Commerce has unveiled a new slotting engine with its Sterling Warehouse Management system (WMS). The engine is designed to identify the most efficient placement for items in the warehouse, enabling companies to more intelligently manage both personnel and physical resources in the warehouse.
“Companies are facing increasing complexity, especially in high volume fulfillment operations,” says Richard Douglass, Manufacturing global industry executive at Sterling Commerce. “The addition of a slotting engine in Sterling WMS brings intelligence to a process that can dramatically influence the operational efficiency of the entire warehousing system.”
Douglass says a good slotting strategy can make warehouse pickers more efficient by reducing the time they spend travel around the facility looking for specific items. Specifically, he says, the slotting engine will help companies establish goals and constraints that determine the optimal slotting strategy, and then perform “what-if” re-slotting scenarios based on those goals and constraints. That should enable a company to:
• Optimize the sequence in which slotting tasks are executed to help ensure their successful completion;
• Plan the labor required to execute the slotting tasks with the flexibility to execute only a subset of the slotting tasks in a situation where sufficient labor is not available to complete all the tasks; and
• Determine return on investment and payback for alternative scenarios before moves are executed.
• The slotting engine comes through a partnership with Optricity, a leader in slotting solutions that offers mathematically advanced, optimization engines to enhance return on supply chain investment.
