According to Smart & Final's Director of Distribution, Carlos Angulo, the resulting delays in replenishment exacerbated the warehouse's space limitations. "At a facility like ours, which supplies 70% of the company's products to its 137 stores, you need to be able to use space as soon as it becomes available. Although the warehouse is over 550,000 sq. ft., there are less than a thousand available slots each morning and we receive around three thousand pallets daily. It's very important that slots show up on the system as being empty the moment they become available in reality," he notes.
Rather than chancing the delay inherent in developing a new system from scratch, Smart & Final elected to enhance the capabilities of its existing system. The company presented this challenge to Motek Information Systems, a technical consulting and systems integration firm in Beverly Hills, CA., specializing in distributed computing solutions. Motek responded with a program written in Paradox® that not only improved Smart & Final's use of space, but also helped to streamline their operations and make them more accountable.
"There were other mandates as well. We needed to incorporate Radio Frequency (RF) computers and bar code scanners to deliver a system capable of tracking inventory depletion and replenishment in real time-keeping up with the physical movement of goods and relaying updates immediately to the mainframe."
Using Borland Paradox, the Paradox engine, and Borland C++, Motek was able to create a real-time, wireless warehousing and distribution system. "The system runs on a standard PC LAN platform and makes use of mobile hand-held and forklift-mounted ruggedized RF computers," explains Price. "It is linked to the host mainframe by means of a High Level Language Applications Programming Interface (HLLAPI) and uses a distributed processing (or client/server) approach to eliminate the single point of failure often found in host-based, non-distributed RF warehouse systems. As a result, the system can still operate even when the host links go down.
"Another important aspect of the system is that it is both flexible and easy to use. In fact, that's why we thought Paradox was the perfect development tool for this application. We needed to build an intricate system that required a lot of expertise on the technical side, but couldn't be etched in stone. With Paradox, we were able to create a system where end users could get at their data, do their own ad hoc reports, and run inquiries without having to tweak the program."
Inventory count information is gathered from scanning bar code pallet tags-also produced using Paradox-with the RF computers. Users are prompted through the process and discrepancies are flagged. Soon after automating, cycle count accuracy soared to 98%. Using this approach, Smart & Final was able to research any variances the same day, rather than wait until the following week as was previ-ously the case.
The new system also tracks product from the time it's received until it's put away, staged, and replenished. When product comes off a truck, it's assigned a bar-coded pallet tag that provides a unique identifier. Bar-coded identification tags are associated with every slot as well. Once the identifier has been assigned, product is ready to be put away. A forklift operator then uses the RF to find out where to place the pallet. He simply drives to that location, scans the slot tag, and puts the product away. The system automatically verifies that the job has been done.
From their desks in the warehouse, managers can run space availability reports and check up on personnel productivity - activities that would have been impossible before the Paradox system made real-time tracking possible. When selectors find no product in selection locations, clerks can use hand-held or the PC workstations to quickly locate items that might have eluded manual searches. Because of the resulting efficiency boost, Smart & Final has been able to squeeze ten percent more productivity from a warehouse that previously was experiencing a pipeline bottleneck. In addition, the real-time inventory system eliminated the problem of exhausting available reserve slots.
"What's more, we can time our letdowns and replenishments to the actual selection process for maximum productivity - virtually eliminating the confusion and double-work. There's no question about it: we now have measurable accountability as well as pinpoint tracking and auditing capabilities.
"We hope to put our second warehouse on the system and switch over to Paradox for Windows within the year," Angulo adds. "And we want to enhance the current system to provide for pulling spoiled and damaged items as well as for monitoring equipment maintenance. There also are many transportation applications."
It's clear to both Angulo and Price that the power of Paradox provides for endless possibilities.