A new pick-up line at Corporate Express Canada

CANADA: For a company moving millions of dollars worth of office supplies every day through its combined Canadian DCs, the decision to make the change to paperless was no small one, and it had to be executed with minimal interference to the operation of its DCs. Corporate Express Canada has made the switch from manual paper to high-tech Voice-directed Picking.

The new system is claimed to have increased the company's labor-hour picking throughput by 300 percent and reduced picking errors throughout its eight Canadian DCs.

Many distribution centers are still picking product the old fashioned way, with paper, and not just small DCs either - some very large corporations have yet to switch to paperless picking many years was picking with paper, but recently re-designed its entire picking operations within all of its eight distribution centers in Canada.

Upgrading to paperless picking does not necessarily mean having to fully automate the operation with sortation and conveying equipment. For Corporate Express Canada, only one of its eight DCs was outfitted with a streamlined conveying and sortation system, but all facilities were re-designed to incorporate a state-of-the-art picking capability.

The change involved not only moving to a very sophisticated voice-directed picking technology, but one which also provided a capability which is completely unique in the industry - an operational picking platform spanning the entire picking environment including picking, inventory control and customer-level transactions through the ERP. The system was developed by Dematic.