Vester (Accellos WMS (Radio Beacon WMS))

The Vester company successfully works in the field of retail for 17 years. Till 2006 their activity was limited to one region – the Kaliningrad region. Since 2006 Vester began to implement the strategy of an entry into the markets of Russian regions.

The distribution center of the Kannel company entering into the Vester group supplies the Kaliningrad retail network with food, alcoholic beverages, household and other goods and also delivers goods to other retail networks and shops.

Tasks

The big distribution center of food with limited storage lives has high intensity of turnover of products and a huge number of commodity units. The warehouse began the work on paper technology. At first it was enough. But owing to increase in number of shops of retail network Vester also goods flows in the distribution center increased. To cope with the increased amounts of works increased the number of personnel three times. The warehouse was open 24 hours a day, operators worked in three changes. Despite the taken measures the situation did not improve. The distribution center did not cope with amounts of works. Warehouse spaces and personnel were used not effectively. As a result - the high cost of processing of products and the low level of service because of delays of accomplishment of orders and human errors.

The company management made the decision to automate the distribution center. Using the WMS system it was supposed to increase performance of the distribution center, to cut down expenses and terms of order processing, to increase service quality.

For accomplishment of an assigned task the agreement was signed with ant Technologies company as the offered warehouse management system Radio Beacon WMS conformed to all imposed requirements.

Solution

Within the project specialists of ant Technologies carried out automation of activity of the distribution center of Vester of 9000 sq.m. The project was implemented within four months. The implementation of the complete solution based on the Radio Beacon WMS system including deployment of a wireless network, delivery and setup of the equipment for automatic identification was performed. In the project the wireless equipment (access points and data collection terminals) of production of Motorola company (Symbol), industrial printers for printing Zebra stroke labels was used.

Within implementation integration of the Radio Beacon WMS system with a financial system of the company was made, and in this case development of the specialized data exchange interface since the standard interface which is built in a system did not meet all requirements of the customer was required.

System implementation was performed step by step, according to the implementation technique developed jointly with specialists of Kannel company. Gradation from old methods of work on new with preserving of continuous activities of a warehouse for supply with goods of retail network was performed. The implementation technique also provided carrying out inventory of the distribution center with transfer of a commodity remaining balance to a system and parallel training of warehouse personnel.

One of features of this project is development of additional functionality to a system – the Certificate Solution program intended for automatic printing of sets of stipulated by the legislation accompanying documents (certificates of conformity, etc.) on all alcoholic products shipped from a warehouse.

Throughout cooperation between Kannel and ant Technologies companies in 2007 the project on updating of a system providing installation of a new software version was executed. The new software of Radio Beacon WMS has advanced functionality which allows to solve effectively the new problems arising in connection with business development of Kannel company. Result

Automation of the distribution center of Kannel company allowed to increase further a goods turnover by more than three times while warehouse spaces remained the same, and number of staff increased only due to increase in quantity of working shifts. Accuracy of transactions at the same time is about 99.999%.

The Radio Beacon WMS system allows to increase efficiency of the distribution center, controlling a goods flow at each stage of a logistics chain. A system allows to trace and manage goods on a basis: expiration dates, batch numbers, serial numbers, etc.

Personnel training to work with a new system and the equipment was carried out along with automation of the distribution center. It significantly reduced an implementation time of a system and allowed to avoid errors at the initial stage of use of a system.