EFFICIENCY ENHANCEMENT IN PICKING PROCESS | 2019

About Facility Centre App

The Facility Centre app enables the FC Heroes to carry out their day to day jobs in an efficient and in a no-lag way. It also enters data into the system ensuring better accuracy in Facility Centre.
This app has another counterpart to it which is a facility centre portal which enables the Supervisors to monitor and assign jobs to the FC Heroes.


What is Picking Process?

Picking Process is one of the daily jobs of few FC Heroes, where they pick ordered products from the storage and drop them in customer dedicated crates.


Who are the FC Heroes?

FC Heroes are the Facility Centre working force, in other words, the backbone of Jumbotail. They handle the products right from when they arrive in Facility Centre till they become part of an order and are dispatched from the FC.


The Business Challenge :

The challenge was to reduce the time & steps of an FC Hero & increase efficiency in the Pick Process.


Project Limitation :

This was a sprint project and the team had a week to make it live.


My Role :

I took up a few Picking Jobs at FC to understand what was causing too much back and forth between the Aisles. 


The Clue :

During the same time, I and my PM paid a visit to the FC for another ongoing project. While discussing with FC Heroes said they happened to discuss too much back and forth walking during the Picking process.


The Cause :

In the V0 of this App, our hypothesis was the starting point of every day to day was a Product. But as the warehouse grew so did the infrastructure. Along came the multi-storey Aisles, heavy-duty machines etc. Product places were dynamic & decided by the system which was based on DRR (daily run rate) and space available. So Product 1 in the list (that FC Hero has) could be in Aisle A, Product 2 could be in Aisle G & Product 3 could be in Aisle D making the FC Hero walk the distance from Aisle A to Aisle G & back to Aisle D.

A map of Facility Centre depicting Product-wise Picking

This resulted in:
– Waste of energy
– Waste of time

Why would they walk knowing which product is located where, as most of the times the products were in the same space?
The answer to ‘How they knew it?’ was FC knowledge.


The Insight :

The FC Heroes were working by the App & would follow the sequence for product picking give on the App.


The Solution :

We sat down with the FC Team to brainstorm. A question that came coming up again and again ‘Why do we have to start the list with products?’

This started to look similar to a Supermarket scenario. For Example: When we as a buyer enter a particular section of products like Vegetables, we buy all the vegetables that we need and then go to another section.

Similarly, why not let the FC Hero pick-up all the products which belong to a particular Aisle and then he can move to another one?

A map of Facility Centre depicting Aisle-wise Picking

This solution was further discussed with tech and then the PRD was written.


The Execution :

The change was on only 1 screen which was the Jobs Landing Page.
Working on the operational side often comes with restrictions. The two big restrictions were time & minimum change in UI so that the App remains as light as possible.

Since this project is part of the Non-Disclosure Agreement,
I wouldn’t be showing the screen flows

The Landing Jobs Screen with Aisle-wise Picking


The Impact :

The Pick Process efficiency increased by 20% enabling the SupplyChain team to pick 20% more products, enabling Jumbotail to fulfil more orders.