Voice Picking
Your pickers work hands and eyes free. Every pick posts into your existing system the moment it happens. Nothing gets replaced.
Andrew Briggs walks your operation and writes you an improvement forecast. No charge, no obligation.
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Voice and data capture running in
Platinum Voice 
Authorised 
The platform
BEC is a Honeywell Platinum Voice Certified Reseller, and Honeywell Voice is the platform underneath the projects we install. These are Honeywell's own published figures for it.
Published by Honeywell at automation.honeywell.com. What your own operation would gain is measured on your floor during the DC Walkthrough, and written up with your numbers rather than these.
Tom Brown Wholesale · Florisoft
Tom Brown supplies fresh cut flowers across London, shipping over 250 orders a day, six days a week. The pick used to run on paper sheets and took eight hours, and every item was checked a second time by another member of staff before it could go out.
"Now a single person can pick and check at the same time, which has completely changed everything we do and created a daily two-hour time saving per picker." Founder, Tom Brown Wholesale
The difference
Your ERP already holds your orders, your stock and your money, and you paid a great deal for it. If your ERP is already managing your inventory and your pick lists, then let us just make it better. The problem is that the software lives in the office while the work happens on the floor, and the two only meet when somebody manually reports the picking activity after collecting the paper pick list hours later.
BEC closes that gap. A picker wearing a headset is told where to go and what to take. They say it back. Your ERP updates that second. No paper, no typing, no waiting until the end of the shift to find out what really happened.
The lost hours are only half of it. Every pick that goes out wrong carries a cost that rarely lands on any report, in credit notes, redeliveries, getting the wrong delivery back, the receiving and inspection time it then takes, and the hours your customer service team spends putting it right. Working out what those errors are actually costing you is part of the walkthrough, using your own figures rather than ours.
Systems we have integrated into, with a named customer behind each:
How it starts
Every BEC project starts the same way. Andrew Briggs walks your distribution centre with you, watches the picking as it actually happens, and puts the improvement case in writing with numbers you can check. It is free, because if the case is not there, both of us are better off knowing before any money changes hands.
What is hurting, how many pickers you run, which system you are on, and what a good outcome would look like. Enough to know whether a site visit is worth anyone's time.
About 20 minutesAndrew Briggs has spent years in this industry. He walks your operation with you. We record the picking process, time each step, and show you where the time is lost, capturing the time spent handling a piece of paper or a handheld computer, and the time spent manually confirming what has been picked.
We will discuss with your customer service team what errors occur and the cost to remedy them, and we will record the time spent preparing pick lists, assigning them to pickers, and reporting them once the pick has finished.
Half a day to a dayFor most companies, an ROI calculation based on a few key benefits of voice picking is enough to state a positive business case and justify the investment. There are further gains an operation gets from voice on top of those, and we would rather you saw all of them.
So we combine the benefits of voice picking with your own data, meaning your number of orders, your labour costs, your current error rates and the error rates you could expect, into one transparent ROI calculation, and we share it with you. In a spreadsheet if you prefer the numbers open, and yours to keep whether you go ahead or not.
Yours to keepFree, on site, and no obligation at the end of it.
On the floor
No clipboard, no screen to look down at. The picker goes to the location as instructed and speaks the check digits on the location, is then told the quantity to pick, and confirms it. Both hands and eyes are on the stock the whole time.
Every confirmed pick posts straight into the host system over the wireless network. Stock levels are what the shelf actually holds, not what someone keyed in at four o'clock.
The system talks a new picker through the job, so product knowledge stops being a barrier. It handles a wide range of languages, dialects and accents, which matters on a mixed shift.
Which route is yours
Both come from BEC and both are our own software. Which one you need depends on what is already in place.
Your existing system stays exactly as it is, and what you spent on it is protected. We configure the voice workflow around the way you already work rather than the other way round, and the only people who retrain are the pickers, in hours rather than months. Hardware, software, installation and support all come from us, so there is one number to call when something stops.
Book my free DC WalkthroughIf nothing in the business is holding your stock and your pick lists properly, voice has nothing to sit on top of. In that case the warehouse system comes first, and BEC supplies that too. It is called eSmart Warehouse, BEC installs it and supports it, and voice can be added on top of it later.
Ask us about eSmart WarehouseProof
"I was very sceptical about choosing voice. It was a large investment for a small company like us. Very quickly, after only eight weeks, I can see it's been one of the best choices I've ever made."
"BEC came highly recommended and although we were evaluating another voice solutions provider, they understood our requirements and took the time to understand our very specific operational processes."
"Our order picking processes are now much more streamlined and accuracy levels have dramatically increased, which means we are saving a lot of time and money as a result."
They did not publish a case study, so we cannot name them. These are the numbers they reported back to us. The savings came from voice picking, using our own volumetrics algorithm to optimise the tote picking process.
Fuller's is owned by Asahi. All of the bottles supplied to their pubs are picked on our voice.
Andrew Briggs, on your floor, telling you what the numbers actually say.
Straight talking
We would rather tell you now than take you through a sales process that was never going to end well.
Questions
No, and that is the whole point. Our software was built to sit on top of a host ERP and feed it real-time data from the floor. Aliaxis kept Microsoft Dynamics AX, Hydrasun kept Syspro, Hallis Hudson kept Infor M3, Cummins kept Oracle.
Nothing. Andrew Briggs visits the site, walks the operation with you and writes up what could be improved and what it would be worth. You keep the findings whether you go ahead or not. If we cannot commit to an improvement in your operation, we will tell you that rather than dress it up.
It depends on the size and complexity of the operation, and the walkthrough is where we give you a real timescale rather than a guess. For a sense of it, Elektron's on-site implementation was completed within a week, and Flowervision was seeing the full benefit eight weeks after going live.
Below eight concurrent order pickers per shift, usually not, and we would rather say that now. There are exceptions, where an operation is growing quickly, the value of each pick is very high, or you are working to very tight time constraints, for example every order having to be picked within two hours of the stock arriving. In those cases it is worth a conversation, but we are not going to talk you into a rollout that cannot pay for itself.
This is the fear worth having, and it is why we build the workflow with your warehouse operatives rather than around them. A Flowervision picker of sixteen years put it this way: "Before voice we used pen and paper and highlighters. Using voice has made my job easier." At Horseware the warehouse staff said they would not want to go back.
Mobile WiFi terminals and wireless headsets built for warehouse conditions, plus the wireless coverage to run them. We design the setup, supply the devices, install it, integrate it and support it afterwards, so there is one company to call rather than four pointing at each other.
BEC is ISO 27001 certified, which is the international standard for managing information security. Your transaction data flows into your own ERP over your own network. We have been doing this for thirty-two years, including for a nuclear site and several food manufacturers with full traceability obligations.
Andrew Briggs walks your warehouse, times the work, and writes you the numbers. Free, and yours to keep whichever way you go.
If we cannot commit to an improvement in your operation, we will tell you.
No charge. No obligation. Takes about two minutes to request.