The Customer:

A leading third-party logistics, or 3PL, provider specializing in food and nutraceutical fulfillment. Their operation served customers with strict compliance needs, including lot tracking and expiration-date controls. 

The Challenge: Burdensome partial-pallet orders

Outbound orders increasingly shifted toward partial-pallet profiles. Pick lines had been built for high-volume throughput. But the escalating manual labor needed to meet the case-pick volume overwhelmed the floor, multiplied labor hours, drove overtime, and put service level agreements, or SLAs, at risk. 

The SC Codeworks Solution: Enterprise’s layer-picking logic

Order patterns afforded a hidden opportunity. Many partial-pallet orders fell into identifiable configurations that, when pieced together, frequently aligned with full layer quantities. In other words, the warehouse was repeatedly rebuilding by hand, what in sum was a full layer.

To eliminate the bottleneck and automate the optimal assembly of these puzzle pieces, the 3PL implemented a layer-picking process powered by the Codeworks Enterprise platform.

The powerful software already boasted a core framework for layer picking, which streamlined the rollout. Once the operation acquired the forklift attachment and completed the physical setup, the solution amounted to a simple plug and play.

But first, key considerations included:

• A dedicated layer-picking area
• Identifying SKUs with high layer-pick demand
• Ensuring the product was physically conducive to layer handling
• Deciding between manual layer handling or a forklift layer-pick attachment
• Item configuration, including units per tier and tiers per pallet
• Forklift maintenance
• Operator training
• WMS logic, including commitment, replenishment and RF-directed instructions 

Implementation focused on configuring the warehouse management system, or WMS, to support the layer-pick workflow. With data powering the software’s decision-making, this included:

• Applying commitment logic to identify qualifying layer-pick product
• Directing replenishment so product was staged in the layer-pick area
• Delivering clear RF pick instructions so operators could execute the tasks consistently and accurately 
• Estimating the labor impact
• Defining the ROI

Specific forklift attachments enabled picking an entire layer in a single motion and delivering it onto a pallet. The operation could use different styles of clamps based on the need to stabilize varying case sizes and weights. 

Critically for a food and nutraceutical client, the process maintained full lot control and expiration-date management. Enterprise leveraged lot and expiration data to prioritize picking the optimal inventory. 

The Benefits: Faster picks, lower labor, stronger SLA performance

Layer picking delivered meaningful operational gains, improving efficiency and profitability while maintaining SLA performance.

Quantifiable benefits included: