A distribution center in the MedTech industry picks 30,000 order lines a day. Optioryx Pulse added picking optimization on top of their existing WMS. Productivity rose 27%, and the operators on the floor barely noticed anything had changed.
The company runs a large distribution center with more than 500 employees and handles roughly 7.5 million order lines a year. A team of 60 operators picks all of it manually. Pulse now sits on top of their existing WMS and decides how those picks are clustered and sequenced before a trolley ever reaches a picker.
30,000 order lines a day
The scale of the operation is what makes the picking process worth optimizing in the first place.
We have roughly 7.5 million order lines each year that are being picked by a team of 60 operators, which roughly translates to 30,000 order lines a day, which is still being done manually.
- Jibbe Hoop, Distribution Engineer, MedTech industry
The picking is done by people walking with trolleys, which means the route they walk and the orders they carry together are the two levers that decide how much a shift produces.
A pick path that ignored the layout
Before Pulse, order clustering happened inside the WMS. Operators manually selected which orders to combine, and the pick sequence followed a general Z-snake route.
We had a pick sequence that was a general Z-snake, a serpentine walking path, which was not optimized towards the actual layout and actual order clustering.
- Jibbe Hoop, Distribution Engineer, MedTech industry
A Z-snake is predictable, which is its appeal. It is also indifferent to where items actually sit in the warehouse and to which orders naturally belong together. Pick runs were longer than they needed to be, and the cost per pick line reflected that.
What Pulse had to do
The team went looking for something their WMS could not provide, with one firm requirement: a box-first principle. Every pick had to be tied to a handling unit before the round started, so the picker always knows which box a given item belongs in.
On top of that, Pulse had to cluster those picks onto a physical trolley, and it had to integrate with the existing WMS rather than replace it.
When the first Pulse-optimized clustering went live in the real operation, the physical process on the floor stayed exactly as it was. No retraining, no new equipment, no change to how a picker does the job.
At the moment we went live with the first actual clustering in the live operation, there was almost no impact for the operators. The trolleys were optimized in the background.
- Jibbe Hoop, Distribution Engineer, MedTech industry
Pulse does its work before the trolley reaches the picker. From the floor's point of view, the trolleys simply started making more sense.
From 15% to 27%
The first measured outcome was a 15% increase in picking productivity, worth up to 9 FTE in the manual picking organization.
Six weeks later, with route optimization and double-stacked trolleys added to the Pulse configuration, the number had moved again.
We've implemented route optimization, also double stacking the trolley, and we've seen a productivity increase of a total of 27% compared to the period before we were using any optimization software. It seems to be stabilizing at roughly 27%.
- Jibbe Hoop, Distribution Engineer, MedTech industry
27% more picking productivity, on the same floor, with the same team, doing the same job in the same way.