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For medical supplier Owens & Minor, finding
the right picking technology was the easy part.
The real challenge was getting 40 of its 52 facilities
up and running on voice in just one year.
TO ANYONE FAMILIAR WITH OWENS & MINOR’S DISTRIBUtion operations, news that the medical supplier was planning to convert its DCs over to voice technology came as little surprise. It had
been apparent for quite some time that the company’s radio frequency (RF) order picking system was falling well short of the mark.
What did raise some eyebrows, however, was the aggressive
timetable set for the voice technology’s rollout. Eager to make the
changeover as quickly as possible, senior management set an ambitious goal of implementing voice technology in 40 sites across the
country in just one year.
Given the tight timeline, it wouldn’t be practical to try to customize
the process for individual facilities. Instead, the medical supplier would
have to develop a set of standard procedures for introducing the technology. The goal was to design a kind of cookie-cutter approach that
could be repeated quickly and easily at each of the locations, recalls
Doug Farley, the company’s vice president of supply chain operations.
Sound arguments
Based in Richmond, Va., Owens & Minor is a distributor of name-brand medical and surgical supplies. It operates a network of 52 distribution centers throughout the United States to serve its customers, which include hospitals, healthcare systems, group purchasing organizations, and the federal government.
For over a decade, the supplier had used an RF-based system to
direct all of its warehousing activities, but as business expanded, it
became clear that the old system could no longer keep up. “Having a
picker lugging around an RF device with one hand and picking with
another, we were losing efficiencies,” explains Farley. “And we were at
