Accelerating Innovation to Meet Supply Chain Challenges
Innovation is a cornerstone and driving principle at ID Logistics. These three winning projects exemplify our mission to continually drive process improvements and boost service levels.
Supply chain innovation is more imperative than ever, as companies contend with uncertainty and try to maintain business continuity in the face of disruption. Enterprises that have optimized operations to scale to demand and streamlined processes to maximize efficiency are best positioned to meet today’s quickly evolving supply chain challenges.
At ID Logistics, innovation is a cornerstone and driving principle. In order to support companies’ efforts to stay responsive to demand and meet logistics challenges cost-effectively, we foster a culture of innovation and creative problem-solving.
Focusing on innovation and operational excellence, and with an expertise on highly technical and mechanized / automated solutions, we have expanded into 17 countries since our founding in 2001. As we enter the North American market, we are putting the same philosophies into practice.
To support and accelerate innovation, we launched the Innovation Booster program, an annual competition that highlights our focus on innovation management. This operations-focused program gives every facility manager the chance to influence how we work by developing or replicating innovative projects in their own site.
The 2020 competition has highlighted the ingenuity across our global operations, with all our Group’s subsidiaries getting involved. After a period of on-site testing, every country picked its own national champion. Ten finalists were selected from 117 innovative projects. A web portal showcasing all projects that made it into the final round was made available to 700 employees, allowing them to find out more about these national champions and vote for the Innovation 2020 winner.
ID Logistics is proud to announce the top three innovations of 2020:
ID Smart
The ID Smart project leverages put-to-light technology mounted on an order picker to increase the efficiency and quality of the order preparation process. Through the use of a high-resolution camera and voice picking technology, this system significantly increases the productivity of picking and can also be used to record and analyze the order preparation process in order to better train new employees.
Pick Trolley 2.0
A large electronics manufacturer implemented the pick trolley 2.0, which combines put-to-light and pick-to-graphics technology to address the site’s changing outbound profile. With the warehouse originally optimized for pull pallet picking, the team was able to satisfy a new requirement of carton and piece picking, without having to make major adjustments to the layout. This innovation also improved the efficiencies of the picking process and improved their overall quality through the reduction of picking errors.
Smart Glasses
This innovation was conceived by the ID Logistics team as a result of a retailer’s request to improve the quality and accuracy of direct-to-consumer orders packed for customer pickup at their stores. By displaying the picking data on the glasses, operators are able to complete splitting or picking operations in a more flexible way. They can also scan products and location barcodes by simply looking at them and receive voice-based confirmations, thus greatly reducing the amount of training time for new operators. This innovation not only led to reducing overall onboarding cost for new employees, but also increased the overall productivity and sorting capacity for ship-to-store-deliveries.