Pep is part of Pepkor, which also owns Ackermans, Dunns, Shoe City and John Craig in South Africa, Pepco in Poland, Best & Less in Australia and Power Sales in Zimbabwe.
The company, having enjoyed rapid growth and increased stock diversity, saw the benefit of moving from the current RF technology to a hands-free picking solution, in order to maintain and even improve picking and distribution levels.
"Psion Teklogix's radio network systems have been so successful in rapidly and accurately handling our picking and storage operations at our Cape Town and Durban Distribution Centres over a number of years, that Psion Teklogix was the obvious choice to implement a voice technology system at three of our Distribution Centres (DCs)," explains Pep Distribution Manager, Jannie Hanekom.
Psion Teklogix's TekSpeech voice technology is a stable "eyes and hands free" solution that ensures improved speed, accuracy, performance and productivity for order preparation, picking, receiving, quality control, data collection, etc - although Pep only utilises voice technology for picking purposes at this stage.
The user-friendly TekSpeech system opens a two-way dialogue between warehouse management systems and DC teams, guiding workers step-by-step through their daily tasks. Time-consuming, inaccurate manual data entry is eliminated as workers are no longer required to read computer screens, handheld displays or printouts, or utilise other devices to carry out tasks. Utilising speech recognition and synthesis, the system translates data from the host computer into spoken directions for the worker. The worker's spoken responses are then translated into data for the host. Transmissions are sent via a radio frequency network that connects the host computer to a wireless, light-weight Talkman T2 terminal fitted to a worker's belt; a headset enables the worker to hear instructions and to literally talk back to the system. This communication process is repeated each time a worker and the host computer exchange information, resulting in real-time working dialogue between the system and the worker.
According to Hanekom, Pep replaced RF with voice in July 2005 in order to improve productivity and accuracy. "To alleviate continuous pressure on supply chain capacity due to sales growth in a deflationary environment, it was necessary to increase productivity and the voice system is giving us a 15% improvement on productivity which, in turn, has led to substantial savings in operating costs."
Hanekom said improved accuracy was a prerequisite for enhancing the goods received process in the retail stores and here the voice system allowed Pep to realise an improvement of 19%.
Hanekom explains the operation of Psion Teklogix's voice system at the company's DCs in Durban and Cape Town: "Our 22 000m^2 Durban Prospecton DC operates with 56 X T2 Talkmans and eight base stations. The DC has 9 000 pallet positions in terms of racking, and processes 12 000 cartons per day, picked with up to six teams of eight pickers each during day shift.
"Four base stations and 24 T2 Talkmans are used at our Durban Mobeni DC. In this 11 500m^2 area there are 522 pallet positions while the rest is a free stacking area. Up to three teams of eight pickers each are responsible for picking 12 000 cartons daily during day shift.
"Kuilsrivier is a high rise, narrow aisle DC with 16 000 pallet positions where 6 000 cartons are processed every day. Five base stations and 25 T2 Talkmans are used by up to three teams of eight pickers every day during day shift in this 11 500m^2 warehouse."
Hanekom continues: "With the implementation of the Psion Teklogix voice system, we also ensured strong focus on change management principals. When we arrived to train the pickers, they were hungry for knowledge and excited to learn. They immediately spotted the huge benefits of the hands-free factor and could not wait to start working with the system, which would improve workflow as they would receive pick instructions while in motion. Because of their enthusiasm, training was made relatively easy and we conducted in-depth in-house training based on illustrations pickers could relate to, and elaborate practice. This accelerated the learning curve and ensured quality output. The ergonomics are far better than handhelds and pickers no longer have eye-strain caused by reading small fonts on screens," says Hanekom.
Commenting on Psion Teklogix's product quality and service support, Hanekom said the company has always been able to rely on Psion Teklogix's prompt response from any of its three branches in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban. He added that Psion Teklogix makes sure that technical staff is highly trained, efficient and able to give meaningful support to the customer.
"Although the Psion Teklogix product is not necessarily the least expensive, we know that we are using a high quality, rugged, reliable product which gives us a rapid return on investment by significantly reducing our maintenance costs, and increasing accuracy and productivity, a few good reasons for us to replace RF with voice in our third and last DC - a process which is currently in progress," concludes Hanekom.
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