Fulfilling commitments

Independent hardware distributor Orgill has kept pace with growing demand for its products and services by investing in technology that helps get orders out the door fast and accurately. Founded in 1847, the Tennessee-based company serves more than 12,000 retail hardware stores, home centers, lumber dealers, and farm stores throughout the United States and Canada, and in more than 50 countries around the world. Fulfillment excellence has been a core competency from the start and remains a guiding light in today’s fast-paced distribution environment, according to company leaders.

“Anything the warehouse associates don’t immediately have, or if they are missing an item or product, we will find that product and make sure our customers have everything they ordered,” Maria Crumb, a supervisor at Orgill’s Rome, New York, distribution center said in a recent company statement. “Our mission is to help our customers be successful. The way we do that is by making sure that we send the correct product to our customers each and every time.”

Warehouse optimization software developer Lucas Systems has been a key part of that effort, helping Orgill move from paper-based picking operations to an automated system driven by artificial intelligence (AI) and voice technology in 2012. The switch yielded immediate improvements in productivity and training, and continues to bear fruit today.

OVERCOMING CHALLENGES

Orgill’s sales have doubled over the past 10 years, coinciding with its shift from manual to automated picking using the Lucas Warehouse Optimization Suite and its Jennifer technology—an AI-powered system that optimizes and orchestrates warehouse operations to reduce labor costs, improve accuracy, and increase throughput. Orgill implemented the system as a way to keep up with the fast-paced growth the company had been experiencing, using Jennifer’s voice-directed picking capabilities to speed operations. Today, the distributor uses Jennifer across its network of eight distribution centers, each of which houses more than 75,000 stock-keeping units (SKUs) and that together total more than 5 million square feet of space.

The system has grown alongside Orgill’s expanding services, which today include filling standard retail store orders, managing inventory for smaller customers, and even functioning as the e-commerce arm for many customers. In all instances, Orgill uses the Jennifer voice picking technology to streamline the fulfillment process—the hands-free system tells warehouse associates exactly where they need to be, what they need to pick, and where it needs to go so that customers receive accurate, easy-to-unload orders.

REAPING REWARDS

Today, Orgill’s warehouse associates are picking faster and more accurately than ever before, and the numbers speak for themselves. Since implementing the system: 

• Picking has gone from 90 lines per hour to 140 lines per hour—a 55% increase, or from one pick every 40 seconds to one pick every 22 seconds;
• Training time has dropped from 40 hours to one hour;
• Accuracy has increased slightly alongside picking speed, improving by 1% to 2%—a big win for Orgill, which had high accuracy rates to begin with. Notably, the company has managed to avoid sacrificing accuracy for speed—a trade-off that experts say all too often accompanies such projects.

“Our quality requirement is 0.4, so 99.6% of the time, the pick has to be with the correct quantity and the correct item,” Josh Sencindiver, order filling manager at the Rome distribution center, said in the statement describing the Lucas project.

Orgill has enhanced and tailored the Jennifer system—both its software and hardware—since the 2012 implementation and has undergone several major upgrades to the Lucas platform as new generations have become available. 

It’s all part of keeping up with the times and growing the business.

“What we did 20 years ago couldn’t keep up with the growth that we have today,” Mark Scanlon, Orgill’s vice president of Northeast distribution, said in the company statement. “Jennifer and the Lucas platform are an integral part of our strategy as we move forward.”