BY VICTORIA KICKHAM, SENIOR EDITOR
AS/RS
Material Handling
Pharmaceutical industry 3PL J. Knipper and Co. expands its material handling toolbox with a scalable,
high-tech goods-to-person picking system that is speeding operations and providing room to grow.
AS ONE OF THE NATION’S LARGEST THIRD-PARTY
logistics service providers (3PLs) for the pharmaceutical
industry, New Jersey-based J. Knipper and Co. understands
the power of flexible fulfillment. The firm manages the
pharmaceutical-sample business for more than 100 of the
world’s top pharma companies, handling everything from
quality and compliance issues to warehousing and distribution to strategy development—with the ultimate goal of
making sure orders are delivered accurately and on time.
Serving the varied needs of such clients requires J. Knipper
and Co. to maintain a variety of fulfillment technologies
across its three distribution centers, ranging from manual
systems for less-complex orders to more advanced solutions
that incorporate high-tech automation.
Such a tall order puts executives like Vic Ricci on the
front lines when it comes to maintaining the company’s
“toolbox” of order-picking and fulfillment solutions.
“We do not force our clients into a specific distribution
solution,” explains Ricci, Knipper’s vice president of oper-
ations. “We analyze the data of the respective client and
come up with a solution that runs parallel to their business
need. We want to provide a back end to our clients’ supply
chain that is both flexible and scalable to their future busi-
ness needs.”
With that in mind, when a new client with a high-veloc-
ity, high-SKU (stock-keeping unit) mix came on board last
year, Ricci knew he’d need to augment Knipper’s toolbox in
order to meet its needs, keep labor costs in line, and accom-
modate future growth. He turned to New Jersey-based
material handling equipment manufacturer Opex Corp.
and its Perfect Pick solution to solve the problem. Perfect
Pick is a robotic goods-to-person picking system designed
especially for high-volume businesses, such as those that
handle fast-moving pharmaceuticals, food products, and
e-commerce orders. Installed at Knipper’s Charlestown,
Indiana, distribution center earlier this year, Perfect Pick is
in use serving the new client and as a model for capturing
new business opportunities down the road.
“The way I look at it, Perfect Pick is another tool in our
toolbox for helping solve clients’ problems,” Ricci says. “We
brought this in to [handle] one client’s business, but we will
utilize it for other opportunities.”
LAYING THE GROUNDWORK
Ricci says he knew from the start that a high-tech goods-to-person picking system was the best solution for the new
customer, a medical-device manufacturer that delivers
sample products to health-care facilities and directly to
consumers. The high-velocity, high-SKU business would
demand considerable labor, a challenge in today’s tight
employment market and a high cost for the 3PL. As Ricci
explains, one of the primary goals was to reduce pickers’
travel time throughout the facility as a way to boost productivity and efficiency.
“We were looking for a goods-to-person solution to
eliminate travel distance in a normal picking environment,”
Ricci says. “The opportunity cost of time, combined with
increased labor needed for expanded pick areas, would be
Flexible fulfillment at its best
