The Partner

 

The partner is a leading wholesaler and retailer of homeware, gifts, toys and games that have been designed for every occasion. They’re an established business having started some many decades ago on the streets of London’s Portobello Road. Their beautiful, fun and quirky products can now be found across the entire globe. They have also been awarded the 2019 Queen’s Award for Enterprise which was given for outstanding continuous growth in overseas sales.

Background

 

Rex London fulfils many thousands of retail orders per week. Their requirement was to be able to optimise the process of picking and packing these orders in the most efficient way possible. Orders needed to be printed in bulk, in such a way that they were sorted by the physical locations of products and then during the packing that validation steps are put in place to ensure the right products are packaged in the right order.

 

Solution

 

A windows-based touch screen application was proposed whereby touch screen devices were located at a location within the warehouse. Using a range of logic and rules based on past order data a function was created that would sort orders by the most effective way which would reduce the distance travelled by the warehouse picker. Different couriers were automatically assigned to the order depending on the order contents, weight and value. The shipping labels were integrated on to the order picking list.

The touch screen application would be used during the packing process, whereby a user would scan the barcode of items which would correspond to an order list on the screen. When it’s confirmed that the order had been packed correctly, the application would provide the go-ahead for the packer to package the order and apply the courier shipping label.

 

It was essential that the application would work extremely fast. There were dozens of instances of the application running at the same time across the warehouse.

 

The application was later enhanced to support the picking and packing of trade orders. These orders were significantly larger than retail orders and so used an alternative way for the users to pick and then pack the customer’s order.

​