PickRight Increases Efficiency at Merchants Grocery Co.

PickRight Increases Efficiency at Merchants Grocery Co.

Challenge

Merchants Grocery is a full-time wholesale food distributor based in Culpeper, VA. The company warehouses a wide variety of products from the foodservice, tobacco, candy, snack, beverage and related categories. They supply approximately 12,000 SKUs to 1,500 accounts located in Virginia, West Virginia and Maryland. Accounts indude convenience stores, tobacco stores, restaurants and institutions and school systems throughout Merchants’ delivery area. In 2011, the company was challenged with increasing the productivity of its workforce and reducing the number of claims it was receiving from customers for picking errors.

“PickRight is making an important contribution to Merchants’ mission of operating a company with high ethical standards and high quality service. When our customers get perfect orders delivered week after week we are building long term relationships built on trust”

Solution

After considering several options. Merchants installed the PickRight order picking solution from ProCat Distribution Technologies. That decision has paid off handsomely, according to Robbie C. Surratt, Vice President of Information Technology. The result has been a dramatic increase in efficiency and order accuracy.

Benefits

One of the primary and most obvious advantages of PickRight is increased picking speed. Order selectors simply glance at wireless display screen on their wrist to see what product to  pick and in what quantity. They verify each pick with a simple scan of the item UPC. No more paper pick tickets to deal with. No more lost pick tickets. No more manual order correction. No more random weight manual entries

“ProCat is definitely one of the best software companies that we’ve dealt with! They provide top notch support and their software is intuitive, easy to use and straight forward.”

“PickRight has reduced our pick times and mispicks dramatically,” Surratt reports. “Our accounts receivables department estimates at least a 75 percent reduction in mispicks. While we still If have a few, it’s a whole lot less than what we had with our old paper system.”

In addition to benefiting from higher productivity and less errors, Merchants has realized a huge gain in back-office efficiencies. Suratt states, “We have eliminated 16-hours of labor per day or two full time positions, by no longer printing paper pick tickets and labels, sending them to the warehouse for placement on cases, then getting back the paper pick tickets and reviewing each one for out of stocks.” “The bottom line,” he explains, “is that clerical work by one day shift and one night shift employee has been eliminated, allowing those workers to handle other job responsibilities.”

Paper pick tickets are no longer needed and package labels are printed on demand by PickRight. Merchants gained additional efficiencies because PickRight allows both batch picking and team picking.

“Our accounts receivables department estimates at least a 75 percent reduction in mispicks.”

“The team pick feature is great for handling unusually large orders. We can put several pickers on large orders so we are no longer holding up other parts of the building waiting for a single picker. While there are many helpful features in PickRight, the extensive management reporting tools have allowed our management team to always have an accurate assessment of how the pickers are performing at all times,” claims Surratt “The reporting is absolutely great.”

Another major advantage of PickRight Is the efficiency it has brought to Merchants’ handling of foodservice catch-weight products. “Before, we were writing product weights on a piece of paper and giving it to office personnel, who would key in the weight,” explains Surratt. “Now, the order selector just keys in the weight on his PickRight device. So we use the picker to handle all this information; it’s just automated the whole warehouse process.”

PickRight is making an important contribution to Merchants’ mission of operating a company with high ethical standards and high quality service. “When our customers get perfect orders delivered week after week,” declares Robbie C. Surratt, “we are building long-term relationships based on trust.”

“PROCAT is definitely one of the best software companies that we’ve dealt with,” says Surratt. “They provide top notch support; their software is intuitive, easy to use, and straight forward. I love working with this company.”

Read the full case study here.