Carib Sales is a family-owned wholesaler of personal care products that it ships to customers across the United States from its 140,000-square-foot warehouse. Until 2004, Carib was using a paper-based method to pick each order without a warehouse management system in place to track inventory.
In 2004, Carib implemented an radio frequency barcode scanning solution, along with a WMS. The WMS printed orders for the pickers that converted individual units to cases or pallets and listed the location of each item in the warehouse by an aisle. The barcode scanners were meant to eliminate the human error that was inherent with Carib's manual picking method. However, Carib realized that the pickers found shortcuts with the scanners that decreased the effectiveness of the solution.
Finally, Carib opted for a voice-directed picking solution to eliminate the picker's ability to take shortcuts - and make errors.
Source: Integrated Solutions