WH Smith Travel has completed the roll-out of voice-picking technology at its two distribution centres in Birmingham.
The centres, which supply 220 WHSmith outlets in more than 160 airports, railway stations and hospitals, now instruct warehouse picking staff using a voice-activated system from Voiteq. According to the retailer, the move from a paper-based picking system has improved productivity and picking accuracy.
'Using paper picking was inefficient. We had to print out the pick sheets every day - it was a huge manual task,' said WHSmith Travel business analyst Darren Heelan.
'It has been difficult to tell whether there has been any uplift in productivity against paper, but we have noticed that the pickers are now finishing on time. There's been a definite improvement in the quality of pick. Accuracy is almost at 100 per cent,' he said.
The retailer acknowledges that it now cannot function without the voice-picking system, and has built a fail-safe feature - provided by security specialist Neverfail - into the solution, to ensure that it never goes down. The feature runs a spare server with all of the data loaded on it, which automatically takes control if the main server fails.
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