Search for greater efficiency

Wholesalers serving independent hardware, home centre and lumber/building material dealers and small chains are engaged in a never-ending search for distribution efficiencies. They have to be, because their smaller retail customers compete against retailing giants, so primarily Home Depot, Lowe’s and Menards as direct competitors in the USA, as well as mass merchants selling some of their merchandise. These include Walmart and online retailers such as Amazon, which now has dozens of distribution centres of its own scattered around the country.
Do it Best Corp., the nation’s second-largest wholesaler with more than $ 2.8 bn in sales, more than 3 800 member-owners and serving dealers in 53 other countries, recently invested $ 34 mio in a new 55 000 m² distribution centre in Sikeston, Missouri. This new building replaced a similar, but smaller, facility in nearby Cape Girardeau, Missouri. The company’s aim was to achieve greater efficiency and ensure lower distribution costs now and in the future.
This new centre, the size of twelve American football fields, is a high-cube facility. It is considerably taller than its predecessor, but the biggest difference is that it employs the latest in order-picking software systems to improve efficiency.
The most innovative of these systems is a new concept currently being tested, in which 5 000 of the company’s slowest-moving items are concentrated in one area, where order pickers can add these items to faster-moving items picked by other employees elsewhere in the huge warehouse.

By concentrating slow movers in a single area, employees no longer waste time repeatedly walking past space occupied by these items to get to faster-moving ones. If the system proves as efficient as projected, it will be deployed in Do it Best’s seven other distribution centres. Its acronym is ASR (automated storage and retrieval system).
For years, the company has been adopting other systems as they are developed. One-storey warehouses were the first big change for all wholesalers decades ago. Materials handling concepts and software innovations over the years have greatly improved operating efficiency, thus enabling wholesalers to get merchandise to customers at lower costs.
Voice picking is another example…