David Miller, National Account Sales Manager, Toyota Material Handling (left) presenting the SMART Award to The Reject Shop’s CIO Darren O’Connor (right).

Dematic customers The Reject Shop, OneSteel Distribution and Woolworths were all recognised for excellence in logistics in the inaugural SMART Awards, presented during the SMART Conference’s Supply Chain Industry Dinner, June 21, 2007 in Sydney.

The Reject Shop

The Reject Shop won The Award for Excellence in Transport and Logistics, presented by the Chartered Institute of Transport & Logistics Australia, in recognition of the discount variety retailer’s unique approach to order fulfillment using Voice Directed Computing.

While Voice Directed Computing is not a new technology, the way The Reject Shop is using Voice Picking as the enabler for its batch picking, “Put” process is believed to be one of the first applications of its type in the world.

This unique approach to order fulfilment has delivered excellent productivity gains, improvements in accuracy and occupational health and safety (OH&S), and given the retailer the capacity to increase throughput to support strong growth plans over the next five years.

In traditional retail distribution centres (DC), the typical practice is to assemble an entire store order at a time.

While designing The Reject Shop’s new DC in Melbourne, Dematic turned that principle on its head and, instead of transporting the whole order around the DC and picking products one at a time, The Reject Shop now picks all of a single product for all of the orders at the one time.

“For example, if we are processing orders for 123 stores, we may require four pallets of chocolate bars to allocate the required stock for each store,” explained the retailer’s Logistics Manager, Philip Beckett.

“The Voice Picking system will instruct the pickers to retrieve four pallets from bulk reserve storage, and those pallets are then taken to the ‘Put’ zone,” he said.

The ‘Put’ zone is a 4500m2 area of the warehouse that is broken up into sections representing the stores, with larger stores having larger areas dedicated to them than smaller ones.

Directed by the Voice Picking system, the pickers transport the batch-picked products on pallet trucks, stopping at each store location where products are required, and ‘Put’ the required quantity of product to each individual store order.

The pickers continue allocating products to each store where required, until there is no more stock on the pallet truck.

“We had seen the excellent results that other distributors were achieving with Voice Picking and we worked closely with Dematic to develop a Voice Picking system that matched our particular order processing requirements,” said Mr Beckett.

“The fact that people can work with both hands and eyes-free is a big advantage, compared to paper-based order picking,” he said.

The SMART Award also recognised the innovative work The Reject Shop has done to improve the efficiency of handling inbound freight, including establishing formal strategic alliances with trucking companies to secure the access to interim staging facilities at peak times and working closely with its buying group to identify opportunities for optimising pallet heights and weights and maximising vehicle usage.

OneSteel Distribution

OneSteel Distribution was Highly Commended in The Award for Manufacturing, presented by the Australasian Production and Inventory Control Society, for the implementation of its OneSAP project, which has real-time enabled OneSteel Distribution’s Supply Chain.

The project, which involved the rollout of a new Australia-wide wireless data communications network by Dematic, has delivered a host of benefits for OneSteel including:

OneSteel Steel & Tube’s National Operations Manager, Ken Davis, said: “We have effectively halved our error rate, increased our first-time order fill rate by 3% and achieved a productivity increase of around 15% on average across all of the sites.”

Woolworths

Australia’s largest retailer, Woolworths, was also Highly Commended in The Award for Excellence in Supply Chain Management and Distribution, presented by the Logistics Association of Australia, for its business restructuring program, Project Refresh.

Project Refresh has helped drive strong sales growth and expansion for Woolworths in recent years, and has delivered $5.3 billion in savings for the retailer since its launch in 1999.

Many of the savings have come as a result of Woolworths’ extensive end-to-end supply chain transformation, which has changed the face of retail distribution in Australia.

Key initiatives under The Mercury Program, which has been responsible for implementing Woolworths’ new Supply Chain Strategy over the past five years, include:

Roger Corbett AM

Former Woolworths CEO and Managing Director Roger Corbett AM was also presented with the Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Profession of Supply Chain Management.

Mr Corbett's 40-year career included significant contributions to the development of industry policy and standards, and implementation of some of the country's most successful new business acquisitions and alliances.

Courtesy of Dematic