Commercial Book Distributor

A company that specializes in buying and selling new and used textbooks to college bookstores as well as directly to students.

This organization sought a warehouse solution that provided a more feature-rich, easy to use application for the employees while replacing their aging mainframe solution. They also needed the new solution to control the company’s three Automated Storage and Retrieval System (ASRS) units and replace the aging Pick-to-Light solution with a new stationary picking method. Finally, they also wanted to improve their overall inventory accuracy

Since the solution being replaced had been heavily customized over the years, they sought to replace it with a packed Warehouse Management Solution (WMS) application. HighJump’s Warehouse Advantage (WA) became the core of their solution. It provided a means to communicate with the Material Handling Equipment (MHE) that we configured to control the ASRS units. It could also leverage their existing industrialized handheld computers and it provided an intuitive interface that made it easy to transition the users from the old system to the new one. Additionally, we tailored WA to create a replacement picking solution to replace their old Pick-to-Light system.

The key to a successful solution transition is to avoid disruption of the client’s business. The second day in production, the solution met all productivity and service goals. The successful project implementation satisfied all goals; the solution 1) divested the warehouse functionality from the mainframe, 2) increased the inventory accuracy and 3) controlled the ASRS units through the MHE interface. In addition, the desirable replacement of the Pick-to-Light system was accomplished.