Warehouse Picking Application
This project brought our warehouse into the 21st Century by digitizing their manual, unstandardized, and paper-based process. Because of this tool our warehouse saw typical processing times plummet from 7-10 days to 2-4 days.
Discovery
Our warehouse had always operated with a paper based process for fulfilling orders. Team leaders would spend hours each day sorting and assigning orders for an associate kanban board, which would often be ignored due to changing priorities or even picking associate preference. Consequently the warehouse often struggled with inconsistent lead times, late deliveries, and high associate turnover from stress.
Discovery balanced the needs and challenges of the warehouse associates with the goals of the stakeholders to define the standard process for the future.
Here I employed tools such as contextual inquiry, interviews, and card sorting to better understand the users.
Vision Refinement
Because the warehouse had never had a universal standard for processing orders, discussions had to be iterative and incremental. I often worked with stakeholders to A/B test designs and intentionally step through scenario maps in order to get their buy-in.
Once we had a prototype with stakeholder endorsement, I repeated this process with our end users as a reality check.
Through collaboration we were able to ensure consent from all of the primary user groups and stakeholders. From there all that was left was to bring everyone's vision to reality. See the gallery below to get a sense of the experience each of our user groups.
Team Leader Experience
The team leader (TL) is responsible for ensuring their team addresses order demand and remains productive. To our user's delight our project was the first time team leaders could objectively see performance. Now instead running after picking associates, in some cases literally, for priority changes. Team leaders could track down orders, receive real time updates on order status, and even prompt associates to return to their TL all without getting out of their chair.
Our team leaders could find orders in the system, see which line items have been picked, who picked them, and more.
Given the logistic departments emphasis of hydraulics and other drive control parts, it was common for a paper to become so oily that it needed to be replaced. Previously line items were physically signed off by each picker so replacing an order required manually rewriting who picked each line item. With our system team leaders could reprint orders and line item labels with a single button push.
Picking associate assignments used to be communicated asynchronously via a whiteboard with magnets. The previous system relied on associates to notice their assignment had been changed or for the TL to find them and talk to them directly. Our product allowed TLs to change associate order type and equipment type from the comfort of their laptops, allowing changes to be "fire and forget."
Shop Floor Associate
Deviation tracking, much like order picking, was also originally a paper based process. Our system moved it to a digital process where team leaders could become aware of deviations before the associate even provided the team leader with the troublesome line item.
Through digitizing this process we were able to reduce deviation processing and more effectively track what deviations existed and where they were stored.
Similar to the team leader experience, associates had a limited ability to reprint line items and order labels, a task originally requiring associates to stop their current task and talk to a TL. With this feature, associates could spend more time picking and less time trying to find their team leader.