Technologies & Frameworks
Technologies & Frameworks
About the company
The company is the second largest brewery company in the Netherlands and one of the largest European malt producers. In 2021, its turnover reached over 800 million euros. The company has 2 warehouses.
The Challenge
In company’s warehouses, operators pick up orders from different customers. For example, if a customer want 5 boxes of beer and 10 bottles of water, the operator has to walk through the warehouse, find these articles, get the necessary amount, and bring them to a dispatch zone.
The client’s need was to automate the picking orders process in their warehouses. The manual workflow in place relied on printing orders from SAP* (on paper), hand them to the operators, and reporting back to SAP after the orders’ completion. The issues the client was facing included:
- no order prioritization;
- no information about the exact location of the articles;
- unequal distribution of orders per operator;
- messy or disordered workflow inside the company’s warehouse;
- large amount of time spent for the completion of an order;
- additional required resources (paper for printing commands, staff) and salary budgets for operators, SAP specialists.
*SAP is a software for the management of complex business processes. It provides solutions to effectively facilitate data processing and information flow across organizations.
The Solution
Our developers and engineers built IntherLC, a software installed on the company’s server based on the voice-picking technology. A big part of the system was written in Java, but other programming languages like Python, C#, JS, and all kind of frameworks and libraries like JavaServer Faces, Angular, Hibernate, Spring, Camel, ActiveMQ, Jetty were also used.
IntherLC gets orders from SAP, releases them in the system, and creates batches of instructions for every operator. It is also generating outbound reports when an order is completed, web reports related to the orders and operators, and dashboards.
Before using IntherLC
When using IntherLC
Voice, Text -to-Speech (TTS) and vice versa
14 voice terminals were installed in company’s warehouses, running on Windows CE OS. Audora, our C# application, is used to play texts and recognize voices. Its role is to play the IntherLC tasks received via Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), convert user voice responses into text, and send them back to IntherLC. Operators are handled in separate threads, and every task must have a reply, transmitted via Nuance, a powerful offline voice recognizing library, written in C.
Results
The developed system shows the exact location of articles, computes concrete routes per operators, prioritizes orders per day/week etc. It simplified the picking orders process via voice terminals and reduced the time spent on orders.
As a result, the efficiency of the warehouse’s employees increased, while the number of hired workers decreased. Any possible injuries of the operators were diminished, as well as the margin of error produced during items’ gathering.
The company reduced costs spent on taxes and salaries.
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F.A.Q.
Do you have additional questions?
The process of onboarding and hiring is different from project to project, but on average we start our projects in about 2-3 months.
All ISD people hold either graduate or post-graduate degrees and all of them are fluent in English. Our talents conduct courses at the Technical University of Moldova and also, they mentor various educational programs for IT specialists. Our developers are certified by Oracle, Cisco, Microsoft & other providers.
Definitely! We encourage our customers to have virtual meetings with the candidates and visit the ISD office to meet the entire team.
All our employees and partners signed a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) and we also sign an NDA with our customers. Thus, all employees involved in a project, are bound to discretion and confidentiality.
We believe in long term partnerships, and we aim to establish a relationship based on trust and full commitment. We have developed internal programs to increase the technical capabilities of our developers and team leads, but also their capacity to establish a strong communication with our customers in order to understand better their needs and expectation. And ultimately, for every engagement we assign a delivery lead, who’s primary goal is to ensure high quality of our services and customer satisfaction in general.
