Case Studies
The latest case studies from SCT
The Situation
The company’s pallet building and transfer process from distribution center to distribution center was largely random, resulting in complicated mixed material pallets and inefficient receipt and put away
Even in the company’s well-organized distribution center, it was difficult to build the ideal pallet for Stock Transport Orders every time. The company’s pallet build process usually resulted in inconveniently mixed material pallets, when single material pallets are far more efficient for the receiving distribution center to accept and put away. For this company, it was not uncommon for a single shipment to contain dozens of different items, which significantly complicated the pallet build and caused additional inefficiencies.
The company also struggled to attain visibility into how the pallets were being built so that it could project how many pallets were expected to be transferred. Because it could not predict the number of pallets with any level of accuracy, transportation scheduling was reactive and therefore, inefficient from both a time and expense standpoint.
The Solution
In order to plan more efficient pallets and gain full visibility into the build process, the company implemented SCT’s Carton Space Optimizer (CSO)—dynamic pallet optimization software to assist the company in efficiently building pallets to ultimately save time and money.
SCT’s Carton Space Optimizer (CSO) enables the company to easily preplan its pallets, keeping related materials and batches together on each pallet. The palletizing software also has the ability to split the pick to align with one pick ticket per pallet instead of one per Stock Transport Order. This capability has a big impact on the company’s pallet optimization efforts, eliminating multiple steps in the picking/pallet building process. The new, technology-enabled process, resulted in an organized pick to pallet procedure, and the ability to drive the pick process through the warehouse so each pallet can be built according to the optimal plan.
Through the use of the CSO pallet optimization software, the company also expedites decision-making when it comes to pallet composition. Furthermore, CSO’s 3D visualizer provides the company with a model that guides users on the placement of each of the hundreds of items on a pallet, resulting in an optimized pallet build, every time
In addition to improving the operation at the sending distribution center, CSO also positively impacted the receiving distribution center. The unloading, receipt and put away process is substantially more efficient due to the logically packed, single material pallets.
Discover CSO
CSO pallet loading software delivers the most accurate pallet configuration through an algorithm that considers volume, dimension and multi-axis orientation of items on the pallet. We call this comprehensive approach the dynamic fill method. Companies that implement SCT’s advanced palletizing software, built in SAP, can achieve significant year-over-year savings by significantly leveraging the optimal pallet configuration and streamlining the pallet loading processes.
