As the data from Peak Season 2022 rolls in, one thing is clear: our solutions helped customers smash throughput goals in record numbers while making the typically hectic peak time just another day at the warehouse.
Think after-Thanksgiving, single-day shipments of 18,000 pieces, an increase in throughput of 300% while using 1/3 of the manpower from the previous year with a traditional solution.
Think about a warehouse manager from a leading American apparel company saying, "In all the years I've worked in a warehouse, this year I was able to take my first real holiday in December. The robots just did their thing."
It was during Black Friday 2022 that this client saw more than a year of careful preparation pay off when they hit their single-day shipment record with ease. But the company didn't just pull off this record by chance. Let's take it back to the beginning of our customers' journey that began in August of 2021.
Relying on Geek+'s expertise in the apparel industry, the client presented a tough challenge: they wanted a solution that offered increased efficiency, one that was quickly deployable and could be implemented in the same warehouse with a fully-operational fulfillment center.
To put it simply, they said, "build us something better for the future, but don't touch our current operations."
After taking a look at the customer’s order structure and business flow, Geek+ proposed a cross-floor multi-zone combination that included 98 Goods-to-Person robots and 15 workstations. The plan strategy called for 2-floor relay picking, which helps customers minimize handling time from workstations to the picking area and effectively reduced cross-floor orders by 15%.
To the customer's delight, the project was delivered in only 2 months. Geek+ met our promise not to disturb existing operations so that the customers could continue to serve customers with the efficiently level they had come to expect.
To give you a fuller picture of the project, let's take a deep dive into the specs of the project before a Geek+ solution.
The warehouse is the customer’s only facility in North America. It handles both B2B and B2C, including handling returns from both.
There are more than 14,000 SKUs, and inventory is shallow. Before Geek+, the warehouse was overwhelmed during the holiday season, and there was an urgent need to improve picking efficiency and storage capacity.
Geek+’s flexible Goods-to-Person solution can organize SKU positions according to the popularity of goods, reasonably allocate storage resources, increase storage utilization, speed up inventory turnover, replace manual picking and sorting and reduce 2/3 of labor cost.
The solution also supports the remote use of PDA to bind totes to reduce picking time, and can bundle multiple single-line orders to improve tote utilization. During the putaway process, the system will suggest storage locations, and move popular items to the front of the warehouse, near the workstation to increase the hit rate and increase picking efficiency by 300%.
Geek+ also designed a double-sided order wall for the customer to maximize the delivery efficiency of totes. The order wall can load 20 orders on one side. When it is full, an operator will move the order wall to a packing station. The station can accommodate up to 4 packing walls and the packer will pack 160 orders in a centralized manner, which further saves time during outbound.
In the apparel industry, Geek+ is trusted by top customers. Providing powerful solutions around parameters customers set, Geek+ will continue to help companies accelerate the digital transformation and flexible upgrade of their warehouses.
