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We chose the name Pakt™ for our new modularized pack-and-ship warehouse automation solution because it encapsulates its functionality perfectly. Pakt also underscores our “pact” or promise to our customers to meet their business and financial goals. It also brings up a play on words that brings up the notion of “takt time” in manufacturing, which is defined by the cycle time required to meet the demand of a product.
For fulfillment centers, this is most important in the hour leading up to order cutoff time when a surge of orders comes in. It is essential to have the capacity to be able to process those orders and maintain the proper service levels it needs in the hour leading up to carrier cutoff.
That’s precisely what Pakt does – ensure it will enable you to accommodate the takt time of your products and organization.
Pakt’s technology stack has three layers. The first layer is software – Numina’s RDS™ Real-time Distribution Software, a warehouse control software solution that is the brains of the automation line. All configurability and all business rules are set within the RDS platform.
Pakt includes a hardware layer of multiple technologies, including scan-weigh-dimension and vision, auto? technology, document print-fold-insertion (PFI) technology, directed void-fill technology, automatic taping, print-and-apply technology, and automatic order sortation. All of these hardware components are modular and configurable. We will continue to add components such as an auto bagger as Pakt grows.
Pakt’s third layer is the analytics layer, which is a valuable extension of an organization’s data and analytics strategy within the warehouse. Pakt’s analytics tools will enable customers to combine transactional data with machine-to-machine data to drive continuous improvement in the warehouse.
The Pakt platform offers multiple software and hardware options that clients can select for their specific solution design. Current modules provide options such as:
Scan Weight Vision Audit Technology – this module includes software and hardware to enable automatic scanning of a container license plate of a container, followed by automatic weighing to auto-verify that the particular carton is within a predetermined weight threshold based on the items expected to be picked into the container.
This technology efficiently catches under-picks, over-picks, or wrong-item picks, and discrepancies are diverted to an Exceptions Lane to be resolved before the carton is closed. It also auto-captures an image of the packed contents and saves the image record with the order, another QC check that is especially useful for customer support divisions.
Print fold insertion (PFI) Technology – The PFI module is an automatic document inserter that will print documents such as packing slips, marketing materials, and compliance documentation. PFI prints and auto-folds documents, and a robotic arm automatically inserts them into the carton.
Automatic Taper and System-Directed Void-Fill – This solution dramatically reduces the employee touches required in a traditional manual package ship process.
Print-and-Apply Technology – After the carton runs through the auto taper and the void fill, the carton continues down the line to Pakt’s print-and-apply solution for touchless printing and applying of shipping labels and other labels.
Shipping Sortation Solution – Pakt can automatically divert containers to a configurable number of areas based on the customer’s requirements in the shipping sortation area. Typically, this is based on parcel carrier designation, LTL consolidation areas, and additional exception handling if needed.
Customers may choose all or some of these Pakt modules for their operations. Further, the modular design of Pakt means that customers can alter their footprint in the future as packing and shipping requirements evolve.
Pakt™ offers many direct and indirect benefits, including the following:
Labor Reduction – The Pakt solution will drive out upwards of 70% of the manual touches out of a manual pack-and-ship process. That 70% reduction is directly correlated to the reduction in labor and costs required to pack and ship orders.
Lowest-Cost Shipment Packaging Decisions – Pakt includes sophisticated cartonization logic, a component of Numina Group’s RDS™ Real-time Distribution Software. RDS cartonization logic is truly best of breed. It offers more sophisticated modeling that makes decisions based on a much wider range of product and packaging factors than any other cartonization software option. As a result, our customers can achieve 90% cube utilization of the carton, dramatically reducing shipping costs.
Order Accuracy – Built-in automatic quality control mechanisms within the RDS software automate and synchronize all steps in the order pack and ship process and capture any potential error before the shipment leaves the warehouse, dramatically reducing order accuracy issues.
Reduced Chargeback Costs – Carrier and other service provider chargebacks are significantly reduced as a result of the RDS software optimizing the order throughout the entire line, whether it’s the selection of the container, capturing of the dimensional data, and reporting it correctly back to the carrier, or sorting the actual container into the proper shipping lane. Pakt ensures that the right decisions are applied for all orders in each area, which can yield savings in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Pakt™ offers many direct and indirect benefits, including the following:
Labor Reduction – The Pakt solution will drive out upwards of 70% of the manual touches out of a manual pack-and-ship process. That 70% reduction is directly correlated to the reduction in labor and costs required to pack and ship orders.
Lowest-Cost Shipment Packaging Decisions – Pakt includes sophisticated cartonization logic, a component of Numina Group’s RDS™ Real-time Distribution Software. RDS cartonization logic is truly best of breed. It offers more sophisticated modeling that makes decisions based on a much wider range of product and packaging factors than any other cartonization software option. As a result, our customers can achieve 90% cube utilization of the carton, dramatically reducing shipping costs.
Order Accuracy – Built-in automatic quality control mechanisms within the RDS software automate and synchronize all steps in the order pack and ship process and capture any potential error before the shipment leaves the warehouse, dramatically reducing order accuracy issues.
Reduced Chargeback Costs – Carrier and other service provider chargebacks are significantly reduced as a result of the RDS software optimizing the order throughout the entire line, whether it’s the selection of the container, capturing of the dimensional data, and reporting it correctly back to the carrier, or sorting the actual container into the proper shipping lane. Pakt ensures that the right decisions are applied for all orders in each area, which can yield savings in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
We offer two pricing options for Pakt. The first is the traditional capital expenditure in which you can purchase the automation outright with a software support agreement. The second option is priced as an Automation-as-a-Service (AaaS) agreement. Please speak with your Numina representative for more detailed information.
Pakt can be cost-justified by using four primary savings buckets – labor savings through reducing touches by over 70%, order accuracy, lowest cost shipping due to cartonization logic, and the reduction of carrier chargebacks.
Numina Group’s warehouse experts will work closely with you to compare current processes, identify improvement areas gained by adding warehouse technology and help you quantify your actual ROI.
You can achieve a 12-to-18-month payback on direct labor for the capital expenditure pricing model. The AaaS model offers a faster payback period with a much lower Year 1 cost, slightly higher recurring costs with a lower residual cash flow in Years 2 to 5, but a much faster payback period as a result of those reduced Year 1 costs.
Regardless of your chosen financial model, you can expect the same high-quality support for your Pakt solution.
Autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) yield high productivity increases, as has been readily evident when deployed in warehouse picking operations. Numina Group customers have experienced a 2X increase in pick rates with our RDS software synchronized with AMRs, bar code scanning, and other automation technology.
In addition to our AMR-supported picking solutions, Numina has designed Pakt to bring the same efficiency of AMRs into the pack-and-ship process. We considered the average (order picking?) volume profile that a client typically achieves with AMRs, which turned out to be 800 to 10,000 containers. We have designed Pakt, synchronized with AMRs, to match that capacity.
Pakt is differentiated from other pack-and-ship automation applications by its power and simplicity as an all-in-one turnkey solution that customers can configure to suit their operations. By taking this approach, we’ve replaced the typical custom-engineered solution typically found in the pack-and-ship space with a rapidly deployable, modular solution with software that will benefit from future enhancements and does not carry the cost and risk of obsolescence of customized solutions. We will support Pakt as a standard product, which means that all users will enjoy the advantages of ongoing software feature enhancements.
We launched Pack to eliminate the large number of manual steps associated with packing and shipping in order without automation. We started with established industrial-engineered standards about the time and steps required to manually pack an order, including:
We have established that the processing speed of a manual pack-and-ship operation typically equals one container process per minute per operator. With that baseline rate, the lower-end rate equals 60 containers per hour per operator. Most companies with manual operations fall within these parameters.
The mechanical rate can achieve up to 900 containers per hour.
Pakt™ is designed for distribution centers (DCs) with eight or more employees in their packing and shipping departments. The system’s modular design allows it to easily scale from 800 to 20,000 cartons and full-case parcels a day. Pakt is ideal for warehouses shipping 2,000+ pre-packed cartons and full-case packages daily.
High-touch labor processes increase labor costs and the potential for mistakes and limit the warehouse operation’s ability to meet daily peak and seasonal demand. By replacing manual processes with Pakt, you can increase throughput while avoiding the challenges and costs of increasing staffing levels. It eliminates the bottlenecks and labor that exist post-picking, ensuring operations can fulfill orders faster and meet customer delivery expectations.
Pakt reduces labor costs by $350K per shift for every ten manual workers in your pack-and-ship operations. You’ll achieve a 12-to-18-month return on investment (ROI) for single-shift operations and a 6-to-9-month ROI for two-shift operations.
Before Numina’s launch of Pakt, companies seeking pack-and-ship automation would have to approach an integrator who would build a custom-engineered solution specific to their requirements. Unfortunately, making enhancements to customized solutions is costly and time-consuming.
With Pakt, we have created a productized solution with multiple modules that can continually be developed, deployed, and supported in a standard way to benefit all Pakt customers. Clients can choose which Pakt modules make sense for their operations and add other modules as needed. Numina Group will manage the development, and roll-out of enhancements and updates in standard product version control, which allows us to scale and drive continuous improvements for all Pakt customers.
By taking this approach, we have created a solution that offers the benefit of rapid deployment and assurance that the software is future-proofed to support customers’ future needs.
The Numina Group
10331 Werch Drive
Woodridge, IL 60517
630-343-2600
How the Right Warehouse Automation Decisions Can Solve Your Labor Woes As the economy roars
The Numina Group
10331 Werch Drive
Woodridge, IL 60517
630-343-2600
