Swift and Simple Batching

IDS is a third-party logistics, or 3PL, fulfillment services distribution provider specializing in e-commerce. Their broad customer base includes both consumer and B2B shipping industries, such as food and beverage, toys and games, nutraceuticals, sporting goods, and health and beverage. They boast over 1.3 million square feet of temperature-controlled warehouse space in Atlanta, Indianapolis and Salt Lake City.

The challenge:

IDS was looking to automate the office tasks that their bullpen of customer-service representatives, or CSRs, had to accomplish each day to direct the warehouse workflow. This entailed processing and allocating customer orders and printing package slips and tickets before handing them off to the warehouse pickers. One major burden of the old system was the CSRs had to arrive an hour or more before the pickers each morning.

The SC Codeworks solution:

IDS was already using Codeworks' Enterprise tier Warehouse Management System (WMS). Their specific needs required customizations to the existing batching functionality. Codeworks was able to expand on logic to allow for automation in the batching process and did so in a way that was swift and simple.

The benefits:

Codeworks revolutionized our batching process by automating the grouping allocation and printing of orders to significantly reduce the time required for these tasks,” said Shawn Goetz, IT director at IDS.
In other words, the CSRs’ workdays became much more efficient. Now, all those employees had to do in the morning was show up, pick up the slips and tickets pre-printed by the computer program, and hand them off to the pickers.
With so many of their simpler, yet time-consuming tasks outsourced to the Batching software, the CSRs had about two to three hours of their time freed up each day. And because IDS had six to 10 such employees, this saved a cumulative 12 to 30 employee-hours per day.

This meant the CSRs could:

• Arrive at work about an hour later
• Spend more time throughout the day focused on customer relations
• Give each account more hands-on care

It’s allowed us to utilize higher-level people,” Goetz said of how Batching has influenced the company’s staffing considerations. “Because before, there was so much busy work, you didn’t want to pay a high-level person. We are serving the customer better now