technologyreview
BY DAVID MALONEY, SENIOR EDITOR
IN APRIL 2007, AFTER 75 YEARS IN BUSINESS, LIQUOR
distributor Odom Corp. took its first steps toward automating its order fulfillment operations. By all accounts, the
move was long overdue. Eleven years earlier, the company
had embarked on a string of acquisitions, buying up 21 beverage distributors around the Pacific Northwest in just over
a decade’s time. And while it was great for the bottom line,
the expansion also created some difficulties. For one thing,
the acquisition binge left the distribution end of the business
with the operational equivalent of a nasty hangover.
A big part of the problem was that the company’s 13 DCs
were still largely manual operations, with workers picking
orders from paper lists. As volume grew, the DCs were finding it more and more difficult to keep up with orders. Not
only that, but accuracy was becoming a concern. Nearly
every order shipped out contained at least one mis-pick.
To gain better control over its operations, the company in
2007 installed a warehouse management system (WMS)
from Retalix. With the software in place, it is now able to
manage its distribution operations in real time. But Odom
didn’t stop there. In order to take full advantage of the
WMS’s capabilities, it decided to automate several aspects
of its operations. After weighing its options, Odom purchased a voice system to direct its order picking activities
and a radio-frequency system to handle everything else.
A clear call
Since its founding in 1933, Odom Corp. has grown from a
one-man bourbon and dry goods distributor to a major
force in beverage distribution. Today, the Bellevue, Wash.-based company is one of the biggest beverage distributors
in the Pacific Northwest, supplying soft drinks, beer, wine,
and spirits to wholesalers, grocery stores, restaurants, and
bars throughout the region. And its growth has not cooled
off in recent years. “During the past seven years, we have
quadrupled the size of our company,” says Julie Taylor,
Odom Corp.’s manager of mobile media. “We went from
466 employees in 2003 to nearly 1,600 today.”
The company now ships 30,000 bottles per day on aver-
age. But in contrast to the situation just a few years back, it
is no longer getting complaints about its shipments from
customers. Today, Odom is shipping with near perfect accu-
racy. For that, it credits the WMS and the Vocollect voice
system that directs its bottle and case picking operations.
For an operation like Odom’s, an obvious advantage of voice
is its hands-free operation. Because workers receive verbal
instructions through headsets connected to terminals worn at
the waist, they are no longer forced to juggle paper pick lists
and bottles or cases. As a result, workers in the bottle picking
area can now handle up to four bottles at a time. Over on the
case picking side, workers are now dropping fewer of the heavy
cases, which has cut down on product damage.
Another advantage is that the voice system contains built-in checks for accuracy. At the start of the order picking
process, the voice system directs the worker to the location
for his or her first pick—for example, with orders that
include bottles, the rack where the bottles are stored in a
pick module. Once he or she arrives at the location, the
worker reads the rack’s check digit into the headset’s microphone to confirm that it’s the right spot. The system anticipates the correct response, and if the worker provides the
expected reply, the system then tells him or her how many
bottles to pick. If the worker reads off the wrong check digit
(for example, the number from an adjacent slot), the system
redirects the worker to the correct location.
After the worker selects the assigned number of bottles, he
or she confirms that number by speaking into the microphone. Because the system is able to quickly confirm the cor-
