DCwise.eu shares in this post ideas on how you can improve your processes ➟
Validation through scanning first boosts the quality of a process. Additionally, the time spend on it is reduced (either directly or indirectly by having less issues). So overall it is a typical best practice to make it part of the processing.
Still many operations struggle with the setup either technically or from a change management perspective. In this post we give some guidelines & pointers on how to move forward on this topic.
Tackling first the technical side; then scanning relies on following 2 elements:
1️⃣ Information - formatted in a readable manner e.g., bar-codes.
2️⃣ Tools - that can read the formatted information e.g., scanners.
What is important to know is that time & technological development is on our side …
The past years many more possibilities either from a hardware side or software side have become available. Although you might now not have either of the 2 elements; nowadays setting these up is no longer a massive project & can now most of the time done through iterative steps. Yes, many of these projects & their challenges are now tackled in a more "experimental" iterative way.
Some examples of the more "recent" advancements:
- Hooking up a USB scanner either by cable or by blue-tooth is easy & cheap.
- There are more & more devices - like smart-devices & tablets - that are built for industrial use including build in scanners - that allow to bring in the scanning with limited effort.
- & creating a bar-code code directly from within a program is becoming more & more standard.
Secondly there is managing the "change"; thus, getting a “burning” platform. As you are maybe aware you can now go shopping with one of the many self-scan methods (Delhaize, Ikea, Brico Planit, etc.). So, are these companies crazy to entrust so much on this technology with customers that are not even familiar to the processes? The basic commonality between all these applications is "ease of use". So, incorporating this in a "trained" warehouse environment is mainly getting all "technical" elements right in an "easy" way.
☞ Once you are taking steps forward a key element of importance to watch out for are the first weeks of using the new process. Here you need to go through a phase with issues, where your technical & process gaps surface. Methods to counter this "hard" moment are using "pilots", leveraging "change agents", etc.
⭐⭐ At this time a close eye is best kept on that the issues raised are tackled and do not start to form a reason to stop the process change. Often you 'll need to force the organization through this period.
Feel free to share more insights on "introducing scanning" within warehousing...
Want to start the transformation of your operations?
👉 Then let us get in touch jan.baert@dcwise.eu or "Get in touch"
