DC Velocity - August 2015

BY DAVID MALONEY, CHIEF EDITOR

VOICE

WHEN EMPLOYEES AT AWANA DON THEIR voice headsets and begin their daily shifts, they’re doing much more than simply filling orders. They are experiencing a mature technology that has evolved well beyond its roots in order picking.

Awana is a direct distributor of educational materials and products for church youth groups, serving more than 11,200 churches representing over 100 denominations. The Chicago-area company began its voice journey 11 years ago when it installed the Jennifer voice system from Lucas Systems to direct its order selection activities. Things quickly snowballed from there. “We started with picking and immediately saw that the payback was so significant that we added other functions within six months,” recalls Steve Hale, director of distribution. Those functions included receiving, putaway, and returns.

Awana’s history with voice mirrors the way that use of these systems has evolved. While picking has always been the sweet spot for voice, many users have successfully expanded the technology into other areas, including replenishment, cycle counting, load building, and shipping. In fact, just about any warehouse function can be voice-enabled, often with little, if any, incremental expense. Once a company has made the initial investment in hardware and software, there is little cost to extend voice to these other tasks.

Awana recently upgraded to new voice software
that allows workers to run their mobile voice
applications on smartphones and to combine
scanning and device displays with voice, leveraging
one of the many developments that have taken
place in voice-directed technology in recent years.
But as game-changing as this and other hard-
ware-related advancements may be, perhaps the
biggest change going on in voice is its newfound
ability to optimize processes and manage worker
performance.

NOT YOUR FATHER’S SYSTEM

If you haven’t examined the capabilities that voice can offer for a while, it might be worth another look. By all accounts, the technology has come a long way in the last decade and a half.

“In the early days of voice, it was cumbersome
and expensive,” recalls Keith Phillips, president
and CEO of voice system provider Voxware. “I’m
not sure the market really understands how much
voice has evolved over the past 15 years,” he adds.
“It’s a totally different technology than it was even
five years ago.”
Both the hardware and software for voice sys-
tems have steadily improved. Batteries last longer,
the units are smaller and lighter, and the addition
of Bluetooth has eliminated the need for a wire to
connect the voice terminal to a headset.

During the past few years, voice providers also
began moving from systems that worked only on
dedicated voice terminals to more flexible software
that can run on a variety of devices, many of which
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