Meeting Diverse Customer Needs
With the Reddwerks WPM suite you can tailor the components and system to focus on your specific needs. Reddwerks can help you meet your goals, whether you’re focused on increasing pick rates, increasing volume, improving accuracy, or lowering shipping costs. Our industry-leading WPM solution also provides complete transparency, auditability, and analytics with hundreds of metrics to quickly remove bottlenecks. Our focus is to continue to lower customer costs without sacrificing quality, accuracy, speed, and information.
Lower labor costs
A top cosmetic company was struggling with double-digit growth year over year and a static order processing system that restricted them to single product locations and static slot assignments. Their only choice seemed to be adding shifts and processing hours to keep up with the demand.
After implementing the Reddwerks WPM solution they have now dropped back down to a single shift and are able to process three times the order volume with mirrored product locations and dynamic order routing based on real-time product slotting assignments and line congestion.
Allowing products to be slotted real-time as they are received so they are active for the next order inducted into the system has massively reduced shorts and back orders. In the prior system they would have to wait for the following day to batch orders and lines for late arriving stock. With waveless real-time processing they now adapt to exception conditions on the fly, saving large amounts of shipping costs and improving customer satisfaction scores.
Lower shipping costs
A direct-sales beauty care products company wanted to lower their shipping costs. Since they ship directly to representatives, order sizes ranged dramatically and they had a high volume of individual shipments.
The Reddwerks suite allowed them to approach this from multiple angles. First, the cubing algorithm Reddwerks uses selects the smallest box size possible for each order. This prevented extra boxes from being shipped or extra packing material being added to boxes that were bigger than needed.
Secondly, using the allowed Reddwerks QC functionality saw the company increase their accuracy rate from 85% to more than 98%. This means there are fewer returns and fewer reshipments.
Lastly, because their pick rates increased, orders were filled more quickly. This minimized the number of overnight or priority shipments.
Increase accuracy
A large clothing manufacturer wanted to improve their already high accuracy because of increasing charge back costs from customers with ever tightening service level agreements. Each error also increased the cost through rushed shipping charges for replacements and for returns processing.
They implemented the Reddwerks WPM solution and saw accuracy improvements on the first day and over the following months it continued to increase 2%, achieving a 99.8% accuracy rating while reducing their order processing costs.
Improve transparency & auditability
A grocery distributor that wanted to improve customer service levels and lower customer credits while also lowering labor costs approached Reddwerks to provide an end-to-end solution for their order processing needs.
After implementing the Reddwerks WPM solution they now can dynamically route specific customers, stops, orders, or product types to QC to ensure high value items or trouble accounts receive extra attention and tracking. Once the orders have been through quality control, metrics and audits show the orders have left the warehouse complete; this results in fewer truck and store credits. In addition, all orders are now audited down to the line items in each container. This allows the drivers and store clerks to more easily validate the order on delivery and saves additional shipping time and labor.
The solution also provided real-time views across the warehouse order processing chain allowing material flow to be balanced all the way from stocking to selecting, QC, palletizing, and shipping. By removing congestion, providing material flow throttling between warehouse areas, and lower container and order dwell times, they were able to save more than 15% of labor costs in the first year alone. In addition, after a simple upgrade from our 3.1 solution to our latest 3.4 solution, the facility was able to save an additional 7% labor costs per year.
Improve planning and visibility
A high-end home furnishing company wanted more automated planning, visibility into order processing, and to have systemic checks and balances to reduce pick errors. The Reddwerks WPM suite met all of these needs.
Reddwerks used the company’s business logic to automatically group orders on criteria such as mass pick SKUs and to determine order-processing priority. This not only reduced supervisors’ time, but also increased order throughput by 18% and more fully utilized the interface with warehouse and labor management systems.
Our system detail on the product level and the clarity of pick locations and requested quantity reduced pickers selecting the wrong products or the wrong quantity by 83%—increasing order accuracy to 99.66%.
The company was able to leverage the wide variety of standard productivity metrics and real-time labor reports available. In addition, Reddwerks WPM allowed them to not only view detail from the wave level all the way down to individual line items, but also to manipulate the data. By filtering and searching on specific information, the company could export the results in the format of their choice and have exactly the information needed.
Improve material flow
A major home improvement equipment manufacturer had well-trained workers who weren’t being fully utilized. They desperately wanted a system that would let them spend less time waiting for information and more time working.
After 15 minutes of hands-on training with the Reddwerks WPM solution, the pickers were already faster than they had been on their previous voice system. Within an hour, the pickers said they finally had a system that could keep up with them and were confident they would no longer be bored. Rates dramatically improved, accuracy was not sacrificed, and management was delivered real-time performance reports as well as full order and container audits.