Darrel Williams, regional director, Northern Europe and South Africa, Honeywell Vocollect comments on the increasing ecommerce demand and the drive in van sales:
Recent reports show that shopping on smartphones and tablets is fueling the home delivery market so much that it has driven up purchases of new commercial vehicles by 22%. In the past, when markets were more predictable, warehouses were built around delivering economies of scale. As more and more shoppers reach for their mobile devices to make their purchases, e-commerce demand means that flexibility and adaptability in the warehouse is increasingly important. Therefore, businesses and retailers need to be flexible and invest in agile technologies to enable this.
Warehouse workers and ‘back room staff’ in particular are under increasing pressure to meet growing home delivery requests and therefore they need to be quicker and more efficient. Voice directed work gives warehouse managers more agile operations and helps increase worker performance and meet high home delivery expectations. Working hands free, where the interaction between staff and the warehouse system is carried out entirely by voice exchanges, enables users to work more productively and with fewer errors. Very importantly for this business model, they also enable workers to pick several orders simultaneously.
Voice directed pickers can be easily re-assigned to other tasks without the need for intense training. The intuitive nature of voice-directed work also means that mid-shift it’s easy to redirect people from one task to another. This provides the flexibility and scalability needed by high-volume, multi-channel retailers experiencing increasing e-commerce demand and changing order profiles to ensure that their customers receive the right order, on time.
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