CANADIAN ELECTRICAL COMPONENT SUPPLIer Thomas & Betts works hard to ensure that its
shipments to distributors and retailers contain exactly
what each manifest declares.
Fulfillment mistakes cost time and money, so the
company has adopted voice picking technology and
incorporated a scale at its pallet-wrapping station to
compare the expected and the actual weight of outgoing shipments.
Still, the company wanted to drive down its error
rate even further. So last year, Thomas & Betts
launched an initiative to fix any mistakes before
orders even leave the warehouse and push picking
accuracy to close to 100 percent.
The result was a solution called Pick by Weight,
a real-time mobile monitoring technology that the
company developed in house and has deployed at its
Bromont, Québec, distribution center.
“We were trying to get as much quality as we could
into the picking process,” says Robert Primeau, a
warehouse management system (WMS) specialist at
The Pick by Weight system consists of a scale
mounted on the forks of a pallet jack. A touchscreen
tablet PC mounted on the vehicle’s handle is linked
to the DC’s WMS system through a wireless network,
so users can compare the weight of every item in the
load to its expected weight and receive instant feedback if the two don’t match.
