Cornerstone Brands Achieves 99.98% Accuracy With Jennifer™ Voice Working With Manhattan Associates WMS
Lucas Systems, Inc., the leading provider of voice-directed warehouse applications for open, mobile computers, recently announced that Cornerstone Brands has completed a successful implementation of Jennifer™ , the Lucas voice directed warehouse application, at its Tradeport fulfillment center in West Chester, Ohio. Picking accuracy with Jennifer has improved from 99.62 to 99.98 percent. Based on the immediate success of this initial voice picking project, and an expected return on investment of 1.2 years, Cornerstone is now expanding the use of Jennifer to its Fairfield facility.
"We selected Jennifer because Lucas has more experience delivering tailored voice applications on open, industry standard RF devices, and we needed a voice system that would integrate easily with our current Manhattan Associates PKMS warehouse management system," said Brent Bachochin, senior director of operations at Cornerstone Brands. "It was also important that the Lucas engineers worked with our team to define a voice process that was right for us, rather than conforming our processes to the software. As a result, the roll out of Jennifer went smoothly and was well received by our associates. The voice-directed process is also safer for our associates on riding equipment, who now always have their eyes focused in front of them with their hands free."
Cornerstone Brands is a family of leading catalog companies for the home, leisure, and casual apparel. The Tradeport fulfillment center ships products direct to consumer and to outlet stores, primarily for the Frontgate and Ballard Designs brands. Associates at the 480,000 square foot facility use Jennifer running on Motorola MC9090 terminals to pick a variety of housewares, home and patio furnishings, and other items from racks using turret trucks, order pickers and similar equipment. Jennifer provides verbal picking instructions through a headset connected to the Motorola terminal, and associates confirm their work by voice. In the month of June order pickers using Jennifer made a total of one picking error as a team.
Jennifer™ is the first voice-directed logistics solution designed from the ground up to run on open, industrial portable computers. Jennifer's flexible, modular design and standards-based architecture results in faster implementation, and her user-friendly voice and innovative, efficient voice dialogues improve productivity and eliminate errors throughout the distribution center (from receiving to voice picking to truck loading). More warehouses use Jennifer on Motorola MC9090, MC3090, and WT4090 terminals than any other voice solution.
"Cornerstone is a great example of how customers with an existing WMS can get all the advantages of a best of breed voice solution running on industry standard RF terminals without replacing or upgrading their back-end system," said Jeff Slevin, COO of Lucas Systems. "There's a misconception that you need the latest tier one WMS to run voice, or that the costs for integrating a voice system with an existing WMS are insurmountable. The reality is that Jennifer's open software architecture makes it easy to add voice to any system. In fact, we have a number of customers using Jennifer without a WMS that are achieving levels of productivity and order accuracy that are among the best in their industries."
About Lucas Systems, Inc.
Lucas Systems has delivered more voice-directed distribution center solutions on a wider variety of mobile computers than any other company. Customers like Cardinal Health, C&S Wholesale Grocers, CVS/pharmacy, Do it Best Corp., Kraft Nabisco, and OfficeMax trust Lucas to deliver solutions that greatly improve worker productivity and accuracy because Lucas truly understands warehouse operations. Jennifer™ , the Lucas voice solution, communicates with warehouse associates through a headset connected to an open, industry standard multi-modal mobile computer. Jennifer creates a conversation with warehouse workers that frees their hands and eyes to focus on the job at hand, reducing errors while increasing efficiency. For more information, visit www.lucasware.com.
SOURCE: Lucas Systems, Inc.