Leading the Way to Voice-Enabling the Warehouse and Distribution Center

The wonders of the voice-enabled warehouse are causing many companies to reassess their processes and procedures in order to leverage the capabilities inherent from voice-enabling their warehouse. In fact, many are calling the voice-enabled warehouse the next generation in distribution center and warehouse material-handling management. A fundamental shift is underway as many thought leaders are reviewing their existing warehouse processes.

There has been a continuum of change over the years of evolving distribution processes that have moved from being paper-centric to RF-centric (think barcode scanning) and now many of these same processes are evolving to become voice-centric. For some, voice has become the starting point for re-engineering warehouse processes and systems, rather than an after-thought.

In the voice-enabled warehouse there are fewer alphanumeric keyboards and barcode scanning is “plan B”, only leveraged where voice technology doesn't support the full requirement. The business argument for voice technology is simple: Hands-free and eye-free enables workers to be more productive, and speech is more natural than scanning or reading a screen.

Understanding Your Business Issues

Every customer engagement starts with understanding your business drivers and how your supply chain logistics operations are organised. Vocollect and our supply chain partners are uniquely qualified to support your process improvement objectives.

We have extensive industry experience in helping companies across a multitude of businesses understand the potential opportunities where Vocollect Voice could provide quantitative value to your business. And since we're from the industry, we're able to clearly communicate with you in a common language to remove the technology mystery often inherent when evaluating new technology solutions.

Our focus is dedicated to improving your supply chain logistics operations within the warehouse and the distribution centre, and making sure you are comfortable with the engagement and sharing process.

Our years of experience have taught us that even with the most extensive understanding of supply chain operations, it is just as important to be able to link that understanding to the business leaders of the organisation. We know that successful customer implementations require a clear, quantitative value proposition that must be tied to achieving a business need. 

Which of these business issues are you trying to specifically address?

• You have a growing business and are being asked to increase throughput to reduce the probabilities on having to develop/purchase more facilities. How can you get more output from the existing organisation and improve existing processes?
• The business is stagnant or is in a slow growth mode and you are being asked to decrease operating costs to help reduce margin pressures from the slower sales activities.
• You are continuing to be confronted with changing and expanding regulatory requirements and need to ensure compliance. Some of the prime areas you need to be responsive toward are supporting ePedigree compliance requirements and the need to support lot/batch/country of origin tracking on all line items. You also may required to support the FDA Bioterrorism Act requirements (21 CFR 1.327(b)).
• You need to increase operational throughput, so you being asked to get more output from the existing organisation and improve processes, without turning the business upside down and putting the day-to-day operations are risk. As a part of the effort, you must figure out how to get more “value” from your existing ERP/WMS implementation or your home grown data system.
• The changing mix of product shipments is causing you to evaluate existing processes to keep pace with the growth of your on-line business and the need to be better able to address the line item order fulfillment business. Within this context, you also are challenged to manage the complexity caused by a proliferation and volume of SKUs.
• Being able to provide a greater level of “perfect orders” is a top business edict in order to improve customer service. You have been tasked with offering options on how to improve shipment accuracies and timeliness of delivery.
• The business continues to look for ways to provide competitive differentiators and customer service offerings. How could you use technology to offer advantages, such as a later order shipment window to help win new business?
• The seasonality of the business continues to challenge the organisation. You are looking for ways to further streamline the on boarding effort for new associates and reduce their training time.
• You’d also like to figure out a faster way to evaluate the likelihood of new hires being able to achieve the desired performance levels. You also would like to offer an improved method to cross-train and leverage existing associates during peak periods.
  

Why Superior Voice Recognition Matters

The acceptance and success of Vocollect Voice amongst hundreds of thousands of users with a diverse range of dialects and local accents can be attributed to the world’s most accurate voice recognition software solution and our extreme recognition accuracy of in-vocabulary speech, developed specifically for the challenging warehouse environment. Vocollect does not believe that “good enough” is good enough when it comes to voice recognition. The accuracy of the voice recognition engine is the number one influencer in achieving a business payback on your investment and directly impacts end-user acceptance.

Vocollect’s core voice recognition strength is our ability to address out-of-vocabulary sounds. As outlined in our white paper Speech Recognition Technology Choices for the Warehouse, we highlight how Vocollect Voice excels at interpreting forklift beeps, pallet drops, fan/freezer noise and miscellaneous conversations. Vocollect Voice is equipped with adaptive recognition that is continuously working to proactively respond to changing voice and environmental conditions. This results in better performance over time. Our aggressive word model adaptation capabilities enable each user’s Vocollect Voice engine to get smarter over time by making continuous confidence threshold adjustments. To the user, Vocollect is more accurate over time.

Global Presence. Local Expertise.

Working in 60 countries. Every day. In over 35 languages.

Vocollect is a company without borders. Most likely if you have a business presence somewhere around the globe, you’ll find a certified Vocollect representative near by. This is quite valuable for companies that operate across regions and across languages.