Picking up advice

A tall man with a large presence, Ehrhardt + Partner Solutions Regional Manager, Middle East Ramon Thoms’ opinion on warehouse management technology carries some weight. He dishes out recommendations

If you refer to Ramon Thoms as a software provider, he will likely get offended. While  his company sells the highly popular LFS 400 warehouse management software, he describes his team more as consultants than salesmen. “We are not just selling a software,” says Thoms. “We are selling a complete solution. We begin with consulting and planning of warehouses, we are training and educating people, we are recommending warehousing material, we are calculating the demands and quantities of devices.” On his visits to customers and potential customers, he often sees areas in which they could improve. Often, he offers the following advice:

Ramon Thoms

1. Focus on processes
Always concentrate on the process itself, not on technologies, not on pricing. Analyse the processes that you want to establish in your warehouse. Do not analyse them only for the next 12 or 24 months. Take a wider look into the future. Do you want to grow? Do you want to add some brands? Do you want to add some new suppliers? Try to think about this. The process within the warehouse defines how many people you need to hire to run the operation, how high your costs will be and how efficient the complete complex will operate.

2. Try voice picking
Pick-by-voice technology is well established in the rest of the world, meaning Asia, Australia, Europe and North America. In Africa and the Middle East, however, labour is cheap, and it is less expensive to hire one or two more staff than to purchase a pick-by-voice terminal.

But, customers from other regions that come to the Middle East as the future central logistics hub do ask for this technology because it offers transparency, reduced errors, high worker security, high performance and efficiency. An employee can use pick-by-voice technology even while driving a vehicle, because he has his hands and eyes free. Pick-by-voice technology is highly innovative, and something logistics providers should consider.

The technology is also ideal for a freezer environment, where workers have to wear thick glasses and gloves. Even if they have paper, they cannot use a pen because the ink can freeze. They have to use pencils. But we all know that if you write with a pencil for more than 15 minutes, it will go dull, and at the end of the page no one will be able to read your writing any more. With pick-by-voice you can wear the sensor over your cap. You have your hands free, and you have your eyes free. The system tells you to go to shelf one, bin number five. It’s very easy and the pickers in the warehouse like it.

The Middle East is five years behind Europe in terms of logistics standards. Five years ago voice picking was new in Europe, innovative companies were investing money in it and it was expensive. Now, you can buy voice terminals from each and every IT company. It is a well-known technology.

Awareness is rising here, however. The EMKE Group’s Lulu Hypermarket chain will be implementing pick-by-voice with us very soon. I believe Choitrams supermarket is already doing it in Saudi Arabia as well.

3. Use pick-by-light wisely
Pick by light is a high performing method of picking goods, but very un-flexible. Let’s say I shift my goods from warehouse location ‘left’ to warehouse location ‘right’. With traditional manual picking it is easy to send my picker from left to right. I can shift my goods as per my requirements. With pick-by-light, however, I have to dismantle the lighting rack and erect it somewhere else.

If you have highly valuable goods and the number of items and the items themselves will not change, then nothing else is faster or better than pick-by-light. Cigarettes, for example, are an excellent product for pick-by-light, because the size of the boxes never changes.

But, if you need a flexible environment – if you have changing products, changing quantities, changing bin sizes and locations, and changing handling units – pick-by-light is not for you.

4. Pick in multiples
On a visit to a prospective customer’s facility, I recently witnessed something very disturbing. A worker went to the racking to pick a box of corn oil on his pick list. When he returned, his new pick list also called for a box of corn oil. His visits to the same warehouse location were only minutes apart. With the correct warehouse management system this will not happen. An intelligent system will tell you, “If you go to pick corn oil, pick two boxes.”

A multi-pick trolley is also highly useful for consolidating orders. If you have a supporting trolley that you can push around the warehouse, with six, eight, even 10 of its own bin locations, you can pick up to 48 orders at the same time.

5. When purchasing warehouse management software, choose a
well-known brand
Many companies in the region avoid using the big software names. They have designed and programmed a solution in their own office or garage that is okay from their point of view. But as the Middle East wants to be the central hub of the world in terms of logistics, these companies need to follow international logistics guidelines. For example, Sony is distributing from Asia to Europe and North America, and if it wants to distribute through the Middle East it will expect the same logistics standards as it already has existing in Europe, Australia and North America. There, local knowledge ends and our knowledge begins. We can help these logistics companies to grow and be ready for international customers.

6. When designing your warehouse, involve a consultant from day one
Consultants like us can advise you and save a lot of money and hassle afterwards if you give us the chance to review plans made by architects. An architect may build a beautiful warehouse, but whether this warehouse matches the requirements of the customer is a different story. We just had a customer hire us to review a brand new warehouse in Jebel Ali and it was a complete mess. There were pillars behind doors, and you could not drive forklifts or unload containers because there were steel pillars supporting the ceiling and wall.

Rack suppliers are not the right address for this. Rack suppliers sell steel, and most could care less about processes and picking products. They don’t care, they just sell racking.

7. Increase dialogue between middle and upper management
Business here in the Middle East is interesting and challenging. There is a lot of potential in the market, but customers or managers in certain positions are afraid of making certain decisions because they might make a wrong one. This is preventing the region from growing and innovating in terms of logistics.

I think the problem lies with the way the decision-makers think and interact with lower positions. Upper management is receiving feedback from middle management who may be afraid to take risks or express their opinions. Encouraging the decision makers to think longer than their table is deep is the challenge in the Middle East. If they look not only left and right, but also to the front and back,