Accuracy Rates Shine Through at Retailer's DC

June 29, 2010
Lighting retailer Lamps Plus has greatly improved accuracy rates within its distribution network thanks to it adoption of warehouse management and labor management solutions.

Lamps Plus is a specialty lighting retail chain with 45 stores throughout the western and southwestern United States, in addition to catalogue and Internet sales. All retail locations and customers are served by an 800,000 square foot distribution center (DC) in Redlands, Calif., that houses approximately 15,000 SKUs including lighting products, ceiling fans and home furnishings.

As Lamps Plus' inventory grew, it added auxiliary buildings near its DC and shifted product positions to maximize storage capacity. However, constantly changing SKU locations and a legacy tracking system that required extensive manual processing had a negative effect on operational efficiency.

"We did not have a system that was going to take us to the next level- we were manually keying inventory movement from paper records, which meant that any errors made wouldn't be discovered for two days," explains Clark Linstone, chief financial officer, Lamps Plus. "As our volume increased, so did the labor required to simultaneously maintain fulfillment levels while fixing inventory errors."

Lamps Plus selected Manhattan Associates' Warehouse Management solution to manage processes in its Redlands DC and leveraged Manhattan's Labor Management to optimize the distribution workforce and create more productivity while reducing overall labor costs. Within months of implementing the solutions, overall accuracy rates jumped to between 98 and 99.8 percent as nearly all manual processes were eliminated.

"We had normal shipping from day one, which is very impressive for a new system with complex processes," Linstone says. "The beauty of the system is that it's actually very difficult to make a mistake. If you try to pick the wrong product, it won't let you proceed. Or, if an item is scanned properly but gets slotted in the wrong place, it's detected and adjusted quickly."