56 DC VELOCITY DECEMBER 2015 www.dcvelocity.com
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MAKING SURE THAT NEEDY STATE
residents have nutritious food every day is
the mission of the Community FoodBank
of New Jersey. Operating in 17 of New
Jersey’s 21 counties, the organization distributed more than 44 million pounds
of food within the past year from its two
distribution facilities. To help it meet rising demand, the Community FoodBank
recently implemented the Cloud Voice
Management Suite (VMS) from Voxware
to manage and direct the picking of food
and supplies.
The cloud-based VMS allows the food
bank to take advantage of the efficiencies
that come with voice picking, but at a lower upfront capital
cost than would be required with traditional systems. The
Cloud VMS is delivered under a sub-
scription-based pricing model. Since the
software resides in the cloud, users do not
require extensive tech infrastructure to
support it, as would be the case for a voice
solution hosted on site.
Within the first three months of implementing the Cloud Voice Management
Suite, the Community FoodBank of New
Jersey saw the time needed to select orders
drop by 30 percent due to increased picking productivity. Food bank managers also
report that team members have adapted to
the software quickly and enthusiastically.
Better still, the cross-trained workers at
the facility can now use the time saved in picking to perform other tasks.
The Community FoodBank of New Jersey takes to the clouds with a voice system that makes sure
food gets where it needs to be.
Fighting hunger from on high
In the early days, however, things did not always go
according to plan. The problem lay with the bar-code
scanning process. Like many retailers, Forever 21 relies on
its suppliers to affix bar codes to the merchandise, and the
results are often less than optimal.
For example, sometimes items arrive
with their codes smudged or wrinkled
by the fabric. That proved problematic for the laser scanners, which can
only scan one line at a time and were
unable to capture the necessary data.
Other problems occurred when items
arrived in plastic bags that reflected
light in such a way as to interfere with
the read. That also proved tough to
resolve because the sorter’s units are
fixed, meaning they cannot be repositioned easily to catch the optimal
read angle.
As a result, the laser scanners were
failing as much as 4 percent of the
time, which equated to as many as
1,500 sorts per hour. “That required
us to pick up the units that were
not read and sorted, research where they were supposed
to go, and then manually take them to the matching station,” explains Jason Kim, the company’s project manager.
Forever 21’s order pickers had to spend about 15 percent of
their time simply replacing faulty bar-code labels or reposi-
tioning items to improve read rates.
To solve the problem, Forever 21 replaced the laser scanners on the sorter with Cognex DataMan 503 image-based
Since the company replaced the
scanners last year, misreads are down
to about 1 percent, and almost all of
these are due to missing bar codes or
labels that were improperly placed
on the garment by the supplier. The
improved accuracy has also virtually
eliminated the need for pickers to
replace faulty bar-code labels. Cognex
estimates that Forever 21 has saved $1
million through improved read rates
and reduced handling.
“The readers allow us to optimize our sort capability,
which saves the labor of manual sorting. We can now process more units per hour and turn our orders faster,” says
Kim.
