DC Velocity - March 2015

BY DAVID MALONEY, CHIEF EDITOR

ORDER PICKING AND FULFILLMENT

WHO SAYS YOU HAVE TO BE A BIG company to pick orders with voice technology?

Even small companies can now take advantage of the benefits (think higher productivity, better accuracy, and hands-free picking) that voice provides. KPM Exceptional is one company that has learned this first hand.

Founded in 1955, KPM is a wholesale distributor of outdoor power equipment for professional landscapers. Its customers include hundreds of independent dealers located throughout the Northeast.

The company currently serves those customers out of two distribution facilities in Kenvil, N.J. One of the buildings stores equipment and accessories (such as lawn tractors, mowers, leaf blowers, snowplows, and heaters), while a smaller facility nearby holds about 11,000 stock-keeping units (SKUs) of service and replacement parts. This summer, the company will move into a new 100,000-square-foot building that’s now under construction. The facility will house KPM’s corporate offices as well as a warehouse that will handle both the equipment and the replacement/service parts.

Before upgrading its picking technology last spring, the company relied on a paper-based manual system in both of the facilities. That worked well enough, but KPM felt it could do better, says Jesse Hellyer, the company’s IT manager. “Our motto is ‘Striving to do what works for your business,’ so we have a culture of working to do things better,” he explains. “We’d been improving our manual processes to the point where they worked very well for us. However, we needed to make a jump to continue to scale with the business. In order to do that, we started looking at other technologies.”