Searchlight – the largest, most comprehensive lighting supplier in the UK have selected Belgravium Atlanta 8000 handheld and Monaco 7100 truck mounted terminals to improve picking speeds, traceability and overall transparency of their Manchester based warehouse facility.
Searchlight, founded in 1945, is a family run business that supplies decorative lighting to over 750 independent and well known high street store groups in the UK. Based in Manchester in a purpose built 120,000 sq ft distribution centre, they employ in excess of 130 people that help service the decorative, hotel, contract and residential lighting markets.
Searchlight are continually striving to design, source and select new products to suit the coming trends and fashions to facilitate the supply of the widest variety of product. The company’s product range is sourced from the UK, Spain, Italy and China and there is a heavy emphasis on Quality Assurance with Searchlight’s agents and teams of inspectors performing continuous checks on both raw materials and finished product to ensure that the highest standards are maintained. Searchlight also ensure that every item is carried to optimum stock levels, assuring that orders are shipped ON TIME with minimum back-orders. They anticipate needs through constant study of field demand and have allocated over 6 million cubic feet to warehouse finished stock!
Searchlight had required a real time RF system to ensure that they met their tight operational parameters required by their key account clients. The main criteria for the system was to improve traceability, picking speed and overall transparency of their warehouse operations within the “goods in”, “picking” and “putaway” operations. The benefits of having real-time information to hand on every facet of the operation – allocated tasks, picking rates, order value, stock location data etc. enabled picking productivity to rise by over 20% within a few months of going live. The benefits for the customer base were immediately apparent, with turn-around of orders now typically 2 days – a rate that cannot be sustained with a traditional paper-driven system. The system has now been in place for a number of years and has become an integral part of Searchlights operation. In order to maintain their highly efficient warehouse operation, Searchlight recently ordered Atlanta 8000 handheld and Monaco 7100 truck mounted terminals from Belgravium Ltd, specialists in the design and supply of rugged mobile devices to help facilitate the optimised running of their Manchester warehouse. The supremely rugged Atlanta handhelds and Monaco truck mounted terminals were perfect for Searchlight, the ergonomic design was not only user friendly but tough enough to withstand the rigours of the environment Searchlight operate within. Alongside their quality product offering, Belgravium were highly commended for their quality pre-sales process together with a genuine interest in the business processes of Searchlight. Searchlight continues to be excited by the potential that radio frequency technology offers with regard to further process improvements. This potential has already been fully realised in key areas of the business and will continue to help Searchlight deliver unsurpassable customer service levels and secure tangible operational improvements.
Belgravium Ltd
Karen Fotherby, Marketing Executive
Tel: 01274 741860
karen.fotherby@belgravium.com
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