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As one of the leading home electronics businesses in the Nordics, POWER provides its customers with anything from mobile phones and cables to large white goods and TVs. Through a combination of automation and smart use of Astro WMS®, the company has dramatically improved warehouse efficiency and customer experience.
Challenge
Orders come into POWER´s 65,000 square meter warehouse both from stores and the company´s website. They get picked, packed, and shipped to Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland. Astro WMS® from Consafe Logistics helps with the management and organization within the warehouse. To increase the efficiency of processes and elevate the quality of service for its customers, the company wanted to tackle the following challenges in picking and packing:
- All goods were picked manually, involving a person using a truck to find a specific product in the warehouse
- Picking speed was 25 picks per hour
- Shipped boxes carried a lot of unnecessary air
- There was a need to better organize shipments for quicker unpacking at stores / faster delivery to customers
Solution
Picking
POWER invested in the automated storage solution, AutoStore. The company´s decision was greatly influenced by the fact that Astro WMS® is a flexible system providing easy integration with AutoStore. The AutoStore robots can automatically store all the smaller items like phones, cables, tablets, and laptops. After a request is processed through Astro WMS®, they present the required products to the picker, which saves a lot of time and effort.
Packing
The company combined a machine for carton cutting with the Astro WMS® Box Calculation module, which, with the help of Artificial Intelligence, selects the optimal packaging material for each individual shipment based on dimensions, cost of materials, and transportation. The new solution automatically cuts boxes down to the most suitable size, which has the knock-on effect of reducing the number of trucks needed for delivery while supporting more sustainable operations.
Shipments organization
Now, POWER uses the logic within Astro WMS® to properly organize shipments. This means all goods of the same type go together, which helps whoever is unpacking them and allows the store to sell faster by getting the goods onto shelves quicker. This method can also ensure that goods intended to go directly to customers can be identified and packed together. The goods can be scanned quickly upon arrival as they are all grouped, and the customers can pick up their orders sooner than when the packing was less organized.
The combination of automation solutions and Astro WMS® has brought benefits such as:
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65% of goods are picked through AutoStore
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The picking speed has increased from 25 to 170 picks per hour
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More orders can get shipped in a more efficient way
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Due to smarter box calculation, delivery costs are reduced, and operational sustainability is improved
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The proper packing and shipment organization with Astro WMS® enhances the customer experience