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Jennifer Bucket-Brigade Voice Picking System Celebrates 10 Years

By Calvin Azuri
TMCnet Contributor

Lucas Systems Inc, recently celebrated the tenth anniversary of Jennifer bucket-brigade voice picking system. Lucas Systems is one of the largest providers of voice-directed warehouse applications company. The celebration was held at Republic National Distributing, located at Deerfield Beach, Florida. It is their national distribution center. There are more than 50 DC’s that are using the Jennifer voice-directed bucket brigades in variety of avenues like, wine and spirits, publishing, convenience stores and retail. The latest version has a lot of features and technological advancements. The latest version is called Jennifer VoicePlus and it enhances flexibility and productivity, especially in high density retail space.

In a release, Republic National Distributing Company’s VP of Systems Operations Stefan Kirshenbaum said, “We recognized long ago that voice was an ideal technology fit for our pick-and-pass bottle picking process, but voice was unproven in this type of operation. Since those early days we have worked closely with Lucas to optimize our customer order picking process for our DCs, extend voice to other processes, and to take advantage of the many advances in speech and mobile computing technology. Over the last decade our average ‘bottle’ picking productivity rates have more than tripled. Our pre-voice pick rates were approximately 3 bottle picks per minutes, and today our top performing employees pick more than 9 bottles per minute, as we have rolled out to other RNDC distribution centers the latest generation of Jennifer voice directed picking software, including the Speedometer productivity management tool.”

Bucket-brigade picking process is where the workers pick items into cartons or crates and pass on the work to subsequent workers in the pick module. Once the worker completes the module he walks back to get the next carton or module. This forces the upstream worker to go on to the next module automatically. This results in zero bottlenecks, effectively providing every worker with work and keeping them busy. Jennifer also supports several totes or buckets batched up in a multi-order bucket-brigade train. This allows the picker to reach into every slot to fill multiple orders.

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