Descartes (Accellos WMS (Radio Beacon WMS))

The Descartes commercial and industrial group (www.dekart.ru) is one of the leading Russian enterprises for production and distribution of high-quality paints and varnishes.

The 30000 tons per year own production meets the environmental standards accepted in Russia and the European Union countries. The company has strong partnership with the leading firms of Europe, the largest Russian producers and own network of distributors in regions of the Russian Federation.

Tasks

Dynamics of development of the company set the management thinking on investments into warehouse technologies seriously. Available warehouses already badly coped with the increasing flow of orders and constantly growing range as management of them was conducted on paper technology.

"We were not satisfied with either the accuracy of the executed warehouse transactions, or time of collecting of orders — the chief financial officer of Descartes company Maxim Chernov says. — It became obvious that the warehouse control system existing at us at that time will not allow to reach required efficiency and accuracy and as it besides had no modern management tools warehouse processes, we did not accept indicators of errors and regrading at execution of operations".

At this time construction of the new commerce and industry Descartes complex in which it was supposed to concentrate office spaces, exhibition and demonstration halls, own production and the distribution center of 7000 sq.m and with a capacity more than 8000 pallets was carried out. The company management made the decision to automate the new distribution center.

At a final stage of construction of an office and warehouse complex the Descartes commercial and industrial group developed requirements to a warehouse management system and carried out the analysis of the WMS systems existing in the market. Future system had to solve the following problems:

Management of a warehouse complex in a real mode of time; Ensuring accuracy of accomplishment of warehouse transactions; Ensuring unambiguous understanding of location of orders; Increase in speed of accomplishment of orders; Regrading exception; Automation of all technology transactions in a warehouse; Collection of information, necessary for job analysis of a warehouse.

Solution

As a result of the held negotiations with several solution providers on management of warehouse complexes selected Pilot company and its complete solution for management of the distribution center of Radio Beacon WMS.

Specialists of Pilot company for accomplishment of assigned tasks, first of all, carefully analyzed and systematized a product line of Descartes company. For different goods, according to their properties zones and storage locations were defined. Settings of a system included special zones for flammable goods, high a pallet, heavy loads and small goods of the accompanying range.

All product line was analyzed by criterion "ukhodimost" (the average number of shipments). For example, for placement of goods of the highest demand places in the neighbourhood with a shipment zone in a so-called "gold zone" were allocated. This zone was separated into cells of selection for which the code corresponding to this or that ukhodimost value was assigned. Such organization of storage allowed to use technology of the managed placement of goods. The Radio Beacon WMS system analyzes information on the arrived goods and defines numbers of the cells recommended for storage of these goods.

During the project integration with the ERP system of Descartes company was also worked and implemented. Organized interaction of systems allowed to come to paperless technology of work of the distribution center.

For ensuring inventory transactions of accounting of trade inventories, settings of regular cyclic calculation of a remaining balance were carried out in order that at any time without stopping works of a warehouse to receive a real picture of a status of trade inventories in a warehouse.

Personnel training of a warehouse to work with a new system became the final stage of implementation of Radio Beacon WMS.

Result

System implementation of management of the distribution center allowed Descartes company to reduce the number of the working personnel by 2.5 times, to increase order fulfillment speed twice and almost completely to exclude run errors of orders.

The Radio Beacon WMS system allowed to organize work of the distribution center of Descartes most rationally and precisely. The implemented WMS system allows to manage the distribution center in real time, to cut down expenses on order processing and to increase customer service quality.