The Customer:

A global Fortune 500 manufacturing and warehouse company with multiple sites across the United States.

The company had partnered with a competing logistics firm, using enterprise resource planning, or ERP, software, at the company’s new warehouse in a major hub. The site was supposed to be the crown jewel of their operations, using cutting-edge technology, including AI-driven robots. But the ERP was far from meeting the company’s high expectations.

The challenge:

The ERP simply wasn’t designed for managing inventory, picking instructions, receipts and shipping—SC Codeworks’ bread and butter. Instead, the ERP was crafted to handle logistics external to warehouse operations, including designing production quotas.

The company had an ambitious target of the number of finished goods it wanted to fill per day. But due to the ERP’s shortcomings, the company wasn’t coming close to hitting its quotas. They wanted to fill 52 completed builds per day—all of them “clean,” with no errors—but each day they were only typically filling:

• 35 to 42 finished goods
• 27 to 30 of them clean

The company badly needed a logistics program that would replace the warehouse management system, or WMS, portion of the ERP’s functions.

The replacement WMS also needed to seamlessly integrate and communicate with the ERP as that software maintained its other external functions and provided instructions to the WMS.

The SC Codeworks Solution:

The backbone of Codeworks’ 3PL softworks solutions is the Codeworks Enterprise product.

This hosted WMS software solution offers cutting-edge management of 3PLs’ regions, campuses, buildings, labor, docks and workflow. Its wizard-driven set-up is swift and simple.

Enterprise is as powerful as it is versatile, allowing companies to:

• Track millions of products in real time, by pallets and lots
• Charge customers by all international weight types
• Process orders either in batch or real-time

For this particular company, Codeworks Enterprise could succeed where the ERP was failing, offering the necessary expertise in warehouse management. The company was actually keenly aware of Codeworks’ capabilities, given the software had already proven itself in some of the company’s other facilities.

The Integration:

Codeworks’ Enterprise WMS software needed to acknowledge instructions from the ERP and then orchestrate them within the warehouse. For example, the ERP would specify that a particular product needed picking at a specific time. The WMS would then translate that request into instructions for the warehouse staffers.

Codeworks is all-about hands-on implementation of its software solutions. A team of Codeworks staffers went on-site at the warehouse and:

• Spent an initial week training the warehouse employees who would be the WMS super users.
• Then, those employees trained more junior warehouse workers.
• During this process, the Codeworks team remained on hand to answer questions and provide support.

Next, the Codeworks team spent two weeks on the Codeworks Enterprise integration.

• This meant rolling out the software within the warehouse while making certain it communicated effectively with the ERP.

After the go-live, Codeworks:

• Maintained staff within the warehouse for a few weeks.
• Reduced their own head count with each successive week until the company was off and running on its own.

Under the ERP, there had been an excessive number of warehouse employees with access to portions of the system that controlled the inventory. This too-many-cooks-in-the-kitchen problem led to errors and confusion within the system.

And so, Codeworks:

• Reduced the number of warehouse staffers with inventory-control access.
• This yielded improved accuracy within WDLS of the precise location and quantity of the warehouse’s products.

Overall inventory accuracy under the ERP was dismal—only about 30% to 70%, when 99% is standard. Consequently, Codeworks helped to manage:

• Ran a complete warehouse inventory
• Placed license plates on the entire inventory and scanned them.
• Compared with the item-level inventory system the company had been using, license plates provided a more granular mosaic of data about each product, down to its arrival and best-by dates.

Prior to Codeworks' implementation, the ERP ran into conflicts when it ordered quantities of items that did not align with the set quantities in any given pack of items. And so, Codeworks:

• Programmed Enterprise to permit for overage deliveries to the line—for example, if the order was for 50 items, but they came packaged in sets of 75
• Standardized the repackaging process, which, for example, was crucial to remaining OSHA compliant for certain weight limits.

Under ERP, a staffer orchestrating picking instructions would have to have work with three different computer programs on as many separate screens, then make hand-written notes on the back of a printed ticket. The pickers would have to lug around a laptop and input deliveries they were set to deliver to the line before they’d actually accomplished the task.

Under Codeworks Enterprise:

• All the picking instructions were automated and streamlined onto one central screen
• The software communicated with the latest technology within the warehouse, including an automated cart, robot picker and radio frequency identification chips, or RFID
• The RFID readers provided real-time data and instructions on the location and flow of products within the warehouse.

The Benefit:

Codeworks Enterprise brought stability and structure to the warehouse’s previously chaotic and disorganized operations. The system eliminated much of the previous burden of manual computer entry and hand-written recordkeeping by warehouse staffers.

Not only did switching to Codeworks Enterprise help the company hit their targets, but they also actually exceeded the targets within two weeks of integration.

Within one month of the Codeworks integration, the company:

• Increased their daily quota to 57 finished goods

Within four months, they:

• Increased their quota to 65 finished goods

Two years after integration, they:

• Added a second shift to the warehouse to meet continued growth and demand