ed—and there’s little tolerance for
delays. An order placed today is
expected to be at the store or clinic
tomorrow.
To assure swift processing,
Harvard Drug has designed its
Livonia DC to turn an order around
within two hours. But the pedigree
requirements threatened to gum up
the works. First, there was the problem of squeezing tasks like lot and
expiration date validation into an
already compressed cycle. Then
there was the question of technology. As the company began looking
into the new data gathering require-
One powerful package.
ments, it quickly realized that its current
system wasn’t up to the job.
“Our legacy software system did not
have the ability to track items at the lot
level,” explains Dale Swoffer, Harvard
Drug’s senior vice president of information technology and chief information
officer. And that wasn’t all. It was also
clear that the DC’s radio-frequency (RF)
picking system wouldn’t be able to keep
up with the new demands. “To get the volume and the validation we needed, it
would not have been possible with RF,
because there are no bar codes [from the
manufacturer] to identify each lot,”
Swoffer says. “We would have had to put a
bar-code label on each bottle with a
unique ID. It was just not practical with
the amount of volume we put through.”
There was no way around it. In order to
survive, the company would have to make
some big changes. “We had no choice,”
says Swoffer. “The bottom line is we had
to make it work or we’d be out of business—period.”
QUALITY BATTERIES
World-class quality. Superior engineering. A broad line of
application-specific products. Fast delivery via a nationwide
distribution network. Plus the best customer and technical
support in the industry. It all adds up to one powerful package.
When it comes to motive power, Deka delivers!
• Lyon Station, PA 19536-0147
Phone 610-682-6361 • Fax 610-682-4212 • Order Department Hotline 610-682-3260
www.dekabatteries.com • e-mail: epmmotve@eastpenn-deka.com
By the numbers
Harvard Drug found the answer to its
pedigree problems in new software and a
voice-directed picking system. The software includes a warehouse management
system (WMS) from Manhattan
Associates that connects to an Axway
software solution that handles the pedigree tracking. The Manhattan software
also interfaces directly with the Vocollect
Voice voice-directed picking system,
which provides workers with real-time
order fulfillment instructions and captures the data needed for lot and expiration date validation.
Today, 40 workers use the voice system
at the company’s Livonia distribution
facility, a 70,000-square-foot center that
fills orders for small piece items and
cases. Individual orders are gathered into
totes, which are conveyed to zones within the pick modules. As a tote enters a
zone, a worker reads the last five digits of
the tote’s ID number into a headset to
notify the WMS of the tote’s arrival. The
system responds by giving the worker
verbal directions to the location of the
first item to be picked. When he or she
reaches that spot, the worker confirms
