48 DC VELOCITY OCTOBER 2017 www.dcvelocity.com
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DALLAS-BASED MANUFACTURER THE WINDOW
Outfitters (TWO) does a bustling business selling high-end window shutters for both residential and commercial
buildings. In the decade since its founding, the company
has expanded its product offerings from its original line
of timber shutters into a full array of wood and aluminum
window furnishings, which it sells to retailers, distributors,
and contractors worldwide.
While that type of fast-paced growth is great for the
bottom line, it can create problems elsewhere in the organi-
zation. That was the case at TWO’s Dallas manufacturing/
In essence, what the company needed
was an end-to-end tracking system—
one that would allow it to determine
the exact status of inventory in its ware-
house (what raw materials it had on
hand) and on the manufacturing floor
(how much was currently being used
for work in progress) as well as monitor the status of orders
(which ones were complete, which ones were still pending,
and which ones had shipped). Above all, the company
wanted a solution that would automatically gather and
update that information, allowing it to instantly calculate,
based on preproduction and postproduction orders in the
pipeline, what and how much material to order.
In its search for the right software, TWO initially considered high-end material requirements planning (MRP)
and enterprise resource planning (ERP) offerings as well as
warehouse management systems (WMS). But in the end, it
chose none of the above. Instead, the company went with
the SKU-Keeper suite of products from Voodoo Robotics, a
Plano, Texas-based warehouse automation specialist.
Designed as an IIOT (Industrial Internet of Things)
solution for the warehouse, the SKU-Keeper system combines hardware and software to track inventory as it moves
through a warehouse and/or manufacturing operation.
Using wireless sensors integrated with a cloud-based inventory management system, the solution not only functions
as an end-to-end tracking tool but also offers full pick-to-light capabilities.
“The system is both and neither an inventory manage-
ment and a pick-to-light system,” says Trevor Blumenau,
founder and CEO of Voodoo Robotics. “It’s a cloud display
device that can supercharge an existing picking and packing
operation.”
At the core of the system are the company’s propri-
etary SKU-Keeper tags, which are four- by two-inch bat-
tery-powered devices that resemble an old-fashioned pager.
The tags, which are attached to inventory storage locations
(anything from racks and shelves to shipping and receiving
bays), keep track of the SKUs (stock-keeping units) at that
location. Among other advantages, the
solution is both flexible and scalable,
allowing users to move tags from location to location as needed as well as add
tags as business grows.
TWO implemented the project in
phases. It initially installed 150 SKU-Once it became comfortable with the system, TWO
expanded access to the order pickers, enabling them to use
their desktops, tablets, or smartphones to locate items for
orders. For help finding a product or material, they simply
click on the item on their device to activate its SKU-Keeper
tag. The device lights up with the picker’s name, the SKU,
and the quantity to pick.
As for the cost, Voodoo offers the SKU-Keeper suite via
a hardware-as-a-service (HaaS) model, leasing the tags at a
nominal cost of about $5 per month. Customers can rent
extra devices during peak periods and return them when
the rush subsides, paying only for what they need.
TWO executives say the new solution has accomplished
exactly what they hoped it would do. “SKU-Keeper saves us
tons of time every month when it’s time to do cycle counts.
For the most difficult items, all we have to do is push the
button on the tag to verify the count,” TWO Procurement
Coordinator Kramer Bailey said in a statement. “Figuring
out what to order from our suppliers is way easier now.”
As business grew, inventory tracking was becoming a serious headache for The Window Outfitters.
An Internet-enabled tracking/picking solution from Voodoo Robotics cleared things right up.
A remedy for window pain
