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Doubling Throughput by Automating Fulfillment

Doubling Throughput by Automating Fulfillment

Numina Group’s automated solution eliminated several manual touches from Sam’s Beauty operation, doubled order fulfillment throughput with reduced staff, eliminating two minutes of labor costs from every order shipment.

Sam’s Beauty, a hair and beauty supplier dedicated to beauty enthusiasts all over the world, had experienced several years of growth, and needed to increase their warehouse order fulfillment shipping volume.

Its existing pick, pack, and ship processes were manual. Order picking was paper-based using totes. “As business grew, our manifesting stations became a bottleneck during peak times. Packing and manifesting couldn’t keep up with our E-Com order volume,” said Jin Park, Operation Improvement Director at Sam’s Beauty. “We would have to continue to add more headcount to cover our growth. This led us to beginning to investigate automation options.”

After reviewing three material handling systems integrators, Sam’s Beauty chose Numina Group due to its Real-time Distribution Software, RDS™ that has a proven pre-developed pack and ship automation module. “They were knowledgeable and able to help our team define and understand the process improvements required, resulting in our ability to more than double shipments while increasing the pack and ship area productivity,” said Jin.

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The Numina Group’s RDS™ Warehouse Execution and Control System (WES-WCS) eliminated several manual touches from Sam’s Beauty operation, eliminating two minutes of labor costs from every order shipment. The new pack-and-ship solution includes an in-motion carton weight capture scale, dimensioner, and print-and-apply label applicator integrated into an automated pack-and-ship conveyor system.

Benefits:

Doubled order fulfillment throughput with reduced staff. Sam’s is now processing over 3,000 orders per day, 2X greater than pre-Covid-19 volume surges. They are doing this with 2-3 fewer operators in the pack-and-ship area, allowing them to reallocate three employees to other warehouse work activities.

Business agility. Due to COVID-19, Sam’s had to close its retail stores and experienced a dramatic spike in e-commerce orders. “We were suddenly receiving what were historically peak season volumes every day,” said Jin. “At the same time, we lost some of our DC work force due to Covid-19 fears, and had to use our office staff in the DC to meet the surge in E-Com orders. Numina Group’s solution was the easiest process for our staff to operate, it is very intuitive, so training is minimal, and we were able to meet the order demand.”

Eliminated shipping errors. The leaner, lower touch pack process reduced the chance of a pick sheet falling off or being attached to a packed carton. The improved pack process and automated labeling and validation has eliminated labeling and manifesting errors. Results: decreased labor, higher customer satisfaction and reduced quality control labor.

Ability to rapidly launch new product lines with minimal impact on order throughput. Sam’s gained efficient order flow with the Numina Group solution, so adding new products that increase order volume is no longer a concern. The system can handle today’s and future E-Com order volume growth.

With Numina Group’s solution, Sam’s Beauty now has a scalable order fulfillment solution that handles 2 to 3X the pre-automation volumes, with a lower headcount. Numina’s pack and ship solution has become the cornerstone of Sam’s Beauty’s business growth. “In the future, we’ll be exploring Numina’s pick by voice for automating the picking process as our business continues to grow.” concluded Jin.

To learn more about how you can more than double your throughput with automation, contact us.