equipment&applications
Do It Best
learns to
The hardware co-op discovered that
toward streamlining order fulfillment. But
adding voice technology makes it better.
do it better
software and RF devices can go a long way
WHEN A DO-IT-YOURSELFER DROPS BY THE
local hardware store to pick up a few things for a
weekend project, he or she’s not likely to give
much thought to how those items got there in the
first place. But if that store is one of the 4, 100
members of the Do It Best cooperative, chances are it involved the intricately choreographed interplay of sophisticated software systems, radio-frequency systems, and advanced voice technology.
But that wasn’t always the case. In the past, the Fort Wayne, Ind.-based co-op, which was founded in 1945, relied on a manual order fulfillment process. “We had a very rudimentary system where
we picked with labels and a lot of data entry,” recalls Brian Etzler, logistics operations manager at
Do It Best.
That may have been sufficient in the early days, but over the years, Do It Best has undergone a rapid
expansion. It is now the hardware industry’s second-largest cooperative (after Ace Hardware), with a
membership that includes 4, 100 independently owned hardware and lumber retailers in all 50 states
and 45 other countries worldwide. Today, the co-op distributes more than 65,000 different products,
ranging from hammers to home décor, from lawn equipment to pet supplies—just about anything
the do-it-yourselfer needs to complete projects around the house and yard.
Given the co-op’s brisk growth, it’s no surprise that by 2002, the rudimentary order fulfillment system was creating headaches at its eight distribution centers. The main problem was order accuracy.
As the co-op was learning, the higher the SKU count climbed, the greater the potential for errors.
“About half of the errors we had in order filling when using paper were because of picking from the
wrong locations,” Etzler says, “and the other half were picking the wrong quantity.”
To correct the situation, the co-op implemented a homegrown warehouse management system in
2002. At the same time, it invested in radio-frequency (RF) terminals for the order picking operations.
