In 2009, DK-expert (a subsidiary of the DataKrat group of companies) completed an automation project at the warehouse of the Sigma‑OPT concern in Voronezh.
The total area of the warehouse complex is 15 thousand m2, containing about 30,000 pallet storage cells and 1,500 mezzanine cells (shelf storage), serviced by a shift of 50 people.
The company provides 3PL services, is the largest wholesale distributor of home care products, household chemicals, cosmetics, perfumes (Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Colgate, Unilever, SC JOHNSON and others), and also has its own retail network of household chemicals, perfumes and cosmetics stores "7 days" and a number of premium boutiques.
Thus, in one project, it was necessary to organically solve the problems of three different businesses of the company, of which the wholesale and retail business are closely intertwined.
During 2007-2008 Concern Sigma-OPT actively developed the retail direction, and the number of stores reached 70. When picking store orders, a conveyor was used, the productivity of which made it possible to pick up no more than 12 orders at the same time. The technology used quite often led to the re-sorting of products between orders picked by one picker. In addition, the conveyor technology was completely non-scalable, which, with an increase in the number of stores, was a “bottleneck” in the supply of stores and led to shipment delays of up to several days.
The use of the Exceed WMS (Infor WM) system made it possible to solve the problem of scalability due to parallelization of operations, increased the accuracy of order picking, which significantly reduced the cost of processing errors, returns, and inventory.
“The staff responsible for typesetting has been almost completely renewed. The personnel who received their salary for the number of hours spent in the warehouse were replaced by more qualified personnel who receive piecework wages. The efficiency and quality of work of new selectors has increased by an average of 50%. This led to an increase in the volume of trade and did not incur additional costs for the increase in personnel and the costs associated with this. - comments, IT director of the Sigma-Opt Concern, - The quality of the set has increased several times, problems associated with replenishment from storage cells have ceased to arise.
“Thanks to the introduction of Exceed WMS (Infor WM), it became possible to unify the warehouse staff, previously divided into two groups - wholesale and retail. In this regard, the number of management personnel in the warehouse was reduced, and it also became possible to flexibly distribute the load on warehouse personnel.» - notes Igor Komarov, the leading business analyst of DK-Expert Company.