DC Velocity - February 2016

BY DAVID MALONEY, CHIEF EDITOR

VOICE

specialreport

ADAPTING TO CHANGE IS NOTHING NEW for South Shore Furniture. The family-owned Canadian company has refurbished its business model several times since it was founded over 75 years ago. Originally, it manufactured wooden toys. It later switched to wooden kitchen furniture until chrome became the rage in the 1950s, at which point it shifted to bedroom furniture. In the 1990s, it began selling office furniture through leading business supply stores. Then came the Internet revolution, and South Shore adapted once more, realizing that its future lay in selling a variety of furniture items online, directly to the consumer.

Today, e-commerce orders make up 95 percent of South Shore’s sales. Most orders come through the websites run by Amazon, Walmart, Wayfair, and other top online retailers. Orders are shipped to consumers from two distribution facilities in Quebec and a third in El Paso, Texas.

Of course, the most recent shift in business
models had some implications for the compa-
ny’s back-office operations. For instance, it soon
became clear that the switch to direct-to-consum-
er order fulfillment would require some changes
to order picking procedures. “Before, we had
picked pallets for stores. When we moved to
online (sales), it changed our strategy,” says
Claude Bernier, vice president at South Shore.

In particular, it would mean a change in the way order picking directions were communicated to associates. In the past, picking was carried out via paper lists. But with the shift to the e-commerce model, order profiles changed markedly, making that impractical. Most orders now consist of a single item, Bernier explains, which means there are too many orders and too much variety to effectively process with paper.

A SOUND CHOICE

To make picking easier and more productive, South Shore turned to the Lydia voice system from Top-Vox to direct order selection. Among other advantages, the voice system, which con-