Corporate Express Canada moves millions of dollars worth of office supplies every day through its combined Canadian DCs. The decision to make the change to paperless was no small one, and it had to be executed with minimal interference to the operation of Corporate Express Canada's DCs across the country.

Upgrading to paperless picking doesn't necessarily mean having to fully automate the operation with sortation and conveying equipment. For Corporate Express Canada, only one of its eight DCs was outfitted with a streamlined conveying and sortation system, but all facilities were re-designed to incorporate state-of-the-art picking capability.

The change involved not only moving to a very sophisticated voice-directed picking technology, but one that also provided a capability, which is completely unique in the industry-an operational picking platform spanning the entire picking environment offered by Dematic. This includes picking, inventory control and customer-level transactions through the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.

By making this change, Corporate Express Canada was able to increase its labour-hour picking throughput by 300 percent and reduced picking errors in its eight Canadian DCs, which are located in Halifax; Vancouver; Calgary; Winnipeg; Mount Pearl, NL; Edmonton; Mississauga, ON; and Montreal. Each of the Corporate Express Canada DC facilities require a bilingual picking system in both English and French.

The biggest of the DCs are in Montreal and Mississauga; each facility is about 130,000 square feet in size and fully automated. Combined, the Canadian DCs handle 12,000 stock-keeping units (SKUs) and ship 10,000 orders daily encompassing 45,000 items. "We were looking at productivity enhancements, capacity growth and standardization of several functions within the operation," says Ed Meyer, vice-president operations, Corporate Express Canada. "The company has been experiencing very rapid growth in Canada for some time now. Our distribution capability is critical to the company's promise to deliver exactly what the customer orders, and deliver it on time, complete and correct.

"Two major changes in operation were planned for our DCs. One was to shift seven of our eight facilities from conveyors and sortation over to picking carts-Mississauga continues to use conveyor and sortation equipment. The other was to implement voice-picking technology into all of our DCs, as we were operating with paper picking and looking for a more efficient picking operation."

According to Meyer, Corporate Express Canada now has more capacity to deal with orders and Dematic's PickDirector product offers other advantages to the company. "With the pick carts put into place, we're able to pick 30 to 40 orders at a time on a cart. Then take it right to the loading dock area," says Meyer. "This allows us to improve our flexibility and capacity to deal with orders in the DCs. With 12,000 SKUs, this has proved to be an extremely workable system for us.

"For the picking system, we already had success implementing Dematic's pick-to-voice into our DCs in the U.S., so we decided to mirror that in Canada. We asked the engineers at Dematic to design a voice-picking system, and what they presented was a comprehensive product centered around their PickDirector capability."

PickDirector is a Windows and SQL database product that's able to uniquely operate voice-picking technology, pick-tolight systems, put-to-light systems and RF-based picking solutions all in a single platform. The system takes order information directly from the Corporate Express ERP system and delivers it to the picker.

With no paperwork, operators pick with both hands instead of just one. Tasks (i.e. reading, writing and searching for stock locations) are eliminated. Pickers wear a portable belt-mounted, speech-recognition device and headset. The terminal communicates to the host computer via standard radio frequency (RF). This highly effective paperless picking method eliminates pick lists. Operators simply listen, speak and scan.

The Corporate Express Canada warehouses have picking processes taking place for replenishment, picking processes that are case-based for large items, such as toner cartridges and cartons of paper. They also have small-order items like individual ink pens and reams of paper. These are now all controlled by a single overall software program, designed by Dematic, which enables a single-screen view of the entire picking operation within the warehouse.

PickDirector order management capabilities include wave processing, intelligent batching to improve productivity, as well as the ability to sort orders by priority, destination, customer and other scenarios. It supports a wide range of picking hardware, and can easily integrate with routing and sortation systems to increase efficiency and track containers and their contents.

In the Mississauga facility, where Corporate Express Canada is using conveyors and sortation equipment, PickDirector also controls a system called Zone Routing, which gives it the capability to control the movement of specific cartons after picking. This involves special handling like quality assurance and priority routing.

The system is linked with the ERP system to automatically route an order to a number of different pick stations to be fulfilled before it releases the order to the shipping sorter. This is fully interwoven with the picking system, which gives a higher degree of efficiency in movement and accuracy across the entire operation.

"Traditionally, in zone routing, the conveyer control system assumes that if the carton went to the correct zone that the order has been picked," says Timothy Post, technology specialist with Dematic. "The carton is thrown back on the conveyer regardless if the pick was actually done, or not, and it doesn't return to the zone.

"This can result in an incomplete order. The system at Corporate Express Canada is different-the conveyer will send that carton into the zone again, and it will keep sending it to the zone until the conveyer system gets the message that all of the picks have been done correctly. This is an application, which is built into the system that results in a much higher level of order fulfilment accuracy."

According to Post, the system also has the ability to do on-the-fly processing. "If an order has an exception, for example a short pick, it gets processed to an exception location," he says. "Traditional systems will not necessarily have that on a short pick. Normally, an order would have to go through an audit or it would have to be manually handled. The Corporate Express Canada system automatically introduces a divert command to re-direct it based on the position of the carton."

The switch over from paper to pick-to-voice for each Corporate Express Canada DC was done over the period of just one weekend. On a Friday, the DC would be picking on paper, then on the following Monday-it would be on a voice system. The entire project, upgrading eight separate DCs, took six months to complete.

This is an edited article provided by Dematic. Jim McMahon is a U.S.-based logistics automation writer. For more information, visit www.dematic.us.