Becor

Becor approached ISD and asked for support and expertise on intralogistics automation. The challenge was to improve operational process though automation of the pharmaceutical warehouse. After studying all the process, difficulties, challenges and all the other details, ISD engineers & developers started the work on a completely new WCS (warehouse control system). That was the starting point of a project which would change the way the warehouse system worked.

How the old process of warehousing looked like before the project implementation

A supervisor defines a vast list of pharmaceutical products (on a hard paper) and passes it to the operators. An operator is walking to certain areas within warehouse to identify the products. Once he gets there, he compares the product name on the shelf with the one on the list, takes the amount of products he needs and places the products in special boxes. Finally, he passes the order to logistics department.

Disadvantages: no synchronization within the process, no monitoring, the orders are difficult to set up and the delivery is slow.

Having a solid experience in Java, we created the project using these reliable frameworks: Spring, JPA, Hibernate, Camel, JaxRS, Maven, JUnit, SLF4J and other technologies. We’ve used Spring as the main development framework to build a high decoupled and secure system. As ORM framework we’ve used Hibernate to link domain model with database structure.

We’ve chosen a free RDBMS PostgresSQL to reduce the total cost of the project. Our system is a distributed application that is comprised of multiple modules which makes our software easy to maintain and reliable. The communication between modules is assured with JMS under Apache ActiveMQ broker. The integration with the host system is implemented through REST APIs. The application offers a user-friendly interface (accessed through a web page) which offers the possibility to monitor and control the system.

We’ve used Maven (with custom goals) to speed up the development process. The combinations of all these frameworks and tools gave us the possibility to deliver a reliable and complex software solution in a reasonable period of time.

Flexibility: the system is expandable and is ready for new features and optimizations, for example SMS or email notifications when some products are out of stock. The possibilities are really impressive.

Productivity: we love Agile methodology and, of course, we used it for this project. The software solution was actually delivered sequentially and the customer had been testing certain features before the whole system was ready. We’ve made an investigation to measure the achievements after the implementation of picking automation software. The calculation is done for one average day of work. According to these numbers: the efficiency increased by 25% and we see a huge decrease of picking errors, by 95% performance chart.

The new software solution delivered by ISD changed the way people work in the warehouse. The picking process is smooth and efficient and looks like this:

• A supervisor has a web interface where he can see all the orders. He is capable to see the statistics, set up priorities and evaluate the volume of work for operators and assign new tasks
• An operator picks up a wearable device (Ex. Motorola WT4090 wearable terminal) and reads the instructions which guide him through the whole process (step by step). No advanced knowledge is needed; the software is easy to use and intuitive
• He scans the bar codes of the products and places them in boxes (the software has all the information about the name of the product, quantity, availability, etc.). Finally, he passes the order to logistics department

The results of the project implementation are the following:

• Full control over the warehouse operations
• 95% decrease in frauds and picking errors
• 25% more efficient workflow and faster orders
• Precise estimation of work volume, available stock, top orders, notification system, statistics, user friendly web interface and much more.
• Administrative data = physical data
• Workforce optimization
• Satisfied customers and business partners

Maintenance: we are not only delivering the software solution but are constantly maintaining it, resolving possible issues and implementing new features. We care about the success of our clients as of our own.