Augmento scales from 300 to 4000+ products with MultiPick® WMS.

Like so many logistics operations, Augmento had stringent DIFOT customer delivery promises that they had to keep. They needed to have enough products on hand to manage next-day deliveries and, with the rapid expansion of SKU’s being offered, better stock integrity and visibility were vital for business efficiencies and reporting.

The Omicron epidemic and its damaging impact on finding and retaining staff meant that they also needed to dramatically speed up the process of onboarding new pickers, packers, and dispatchers working in their warehouse.

Just to add a little extra spice to the go-live, the implementation was to be carried out over a weekend heavily impacted by a Covid lockdown. Many staff were out of action with the virus and one of the biggest months of the year was looming large.

After initial consultancy and several deep-dive workshops to iron out the specifics of the specification, Augmento went for a Cloud-based version of MultiPick®. This was configured to support the three different types of transactions they needed.

MultiPick® was placed at the centre of a business-critical process flow. This circular flow of bulk inward goods, put-away, replenishment, and orders flowing out into the distribution channels is the beating heart of Augmento’s operation.

The circular flow starts with receiving goods accurately using the Put Away function, so things are always stored at the correct pick face or placed into bulk overflow locations. Orders flow with a purchase order from Augmento’s ERP system, MoneyWorks, into a picking queue where they are allocated to an operator who takes a printed token to their picking station.

The flexibility of MultiPick® was key as Augmento runs three quite different types of transactions through one 1500m² warehouse:

Pallet deliveries to the DC’s of large customers
Carton deliveries to the nationwide branches of retail and B2B customers
Drop shipping fulfilment for e-commerce transactions

“Handheld scanners tell my guys exactly where to go, what to pick and the location barcoding and verifying system drives up my levels of stock integrity and visibility.”
— Cam Tingey, CEO, Augmento

The simplicity of the system means that a new staff member can be onboarded and productive as a picker in under 15 minutes. An inventory checker now gets up to speed in under an hour.

On returning to the Augmento Pack Desk, picked orders flow to a Staging Area for a scan check where an order is closed off in MultiPick® and processed for invoicing and delivery using Starshipit.

The warehouse staff can now be much more nimble, covering off each other’s roles in the system with a common user interface and an intuitive process. Meanwhile, up in the management office, Cam and his team can run their eyes over all the staff performance metrics and hit those DIFOT agreements.