As the leading global e-commerce service provider focused on delivering digital and computer, consumer electronics, and communication (3C) products to users worldwide, our customer is highly dependent on IT systems. With its own development team, it has built a series of internal operating systems including office automation (OA), customer service, website, order management and procurement.

Its logistics centre in Shenzhen is responsible for the sorting and distribution of global orders, ensuring that orders from all over the world are delivered to each customer in a timely and accurate manner.

What were our customer’s requirements?

As their business grew, our customer faced a number of logistical challenges which led them to seeking out Honeywell Logistics Solutions to help them implement systems and provide support to the logistics centre.

With a loyal following of customers through various social media platforms, which include, Facebook, Twitter and various digital forums, timeliness was one of the main concerns for our customer. This was due to the fact that when customers placed orders through their website, the purchasing team would have to immediately process the orders within China.

After that, when the supplier delivers the products to their warehouse and before it is shipped out, it goes through a stringent process that includes product verification, quality inspection, packaging change, then put away, picking and packing. The necessary procurement cycle and receiving process are affected by the time of order delivery, thus maximising the efficiency of order sorting and execution in the warehouse is the core goal for the warehouse operations.

As our customer mainly deals with 3C, small digital products and large-scale products such as aircraft models, the daily cargo deliveries to the warehouse varied and in high volumes. The traditional manual work was time-consuming and experienced frequent errors.

Most of their warehouses operate manually, and product picking was conducted on a per order method. This resulted in low efficiency and accuracy, and it was difficult to support the development speed and expansion.

How did we meet our customer’s order?

In order to resolve these challenges, our customer chose Honeywell Logistics Solutions Warehouse Management System (HLS WMS) to provide an overall upgrade to their warehouse management.‍

With HLS WMS, it ensured that products smaller in size and inbound volume are stored in standard totes, unified into totes after packaging, and labeled with a barcode for easy management. To further improve efficiency, the delivery location is also barcoded, items are placed in tote boxes with uniform specifications and a random putaway method is used. The location bar code, or the tote bar code is then scanned during cargo picking to ensure the correct picking is performed.‍

To handle large volume of orders, HLS WMS helped our customer adopt the wave picking strategy and the “order zone optimisation” method. Both these strategies ensure that each wave is sorted in the same (or few) lanes for fast picking. The combination of RF and picking trucks for cluster picking also greatly improves the accuracy of the task.

What was the end result?

With HLS WMS, our customer was able to transform their operation process. With the improved efficiency of personnel picking, they now achieve 800-1200 orders per person per day.