Material Handling AS/RS
Commitment
to Service
The Port of Long Beach is the
greenest, fastest, most efficient
gateway for goods moving to and
from Asia and marketplaces across
America.
We’re keeping our competitive
edge while working sustainably,
offering unrivaled customer
service while we build the Green
Port of the Future.
42 DC VELOCITY OCTOBER 2019 www.dcvelocity.com
greatly diminished in the Perfect Pick environment.”
The beauty of the system is its flexibility, says Opex’s Joe
McGinnis, director of integrator relations, who worked with
Ricci and his team on the Perfect Pick HD implementation.
The system is designed so that iBots can be added and removed
quickly to scale up or down according to business needs, and
pickers can be added as well. During slower times, for example,
one picker can access products in all 10,400 of the system’s
storage totes. During busier times, Knipper can add pickers
at the system’s three other workstations as needed. When new
pickers log in, the software that controls the system recognizes
the new person and directs orders to the additional picking
station.
Knipper built the system with room for even further expansion. McGinnis explains that the system can accommodate a
surge in business from the existing client or the addition of
new clients that could benefit from the same high-volume
solution. Knipper can easily add more aisles to accommodate
growth as well, he says.
As Ricci explains: “We built so we could scale.”
GAINING EFFICIENCY
Knipper has been using Perfect Pick HD to fill orders since
this spring, and the benefits are already stacking up, according
to Ricci. Concentrating picking in one location saves time and
labor, allowing the 3PL to allocate resources to portions of the
DC dedicated to serving other clients. The new system is also
helping the company maintain high levels of accuracy across
its DCs—a vital aspect of the pharmaceutical business, which
involves heavy regulation, product shelf-life concerns, and
often, time-sensitive delivery of life-saving products. Perfect
Pick HD integrates with Knipper’s warehouse management
software (WMS), which “does the heavy lifting” of tracking
inventory based on expiration dates, first-in/first-out guidelines, and other applicable rules, according to McGinnis.
