Europe’s biggest single price discount retailer, Poundland, today announced it has gone live with a deployment of Motion® F5 Tablet PCs in two warehouse hubs in the Midlands. The specialised tablets replace cumbersome legacy data collection equipment and significantly improve the productivity of Poundland Quality Assurance (QA) teams in both locations and ensure Poundland’s supply chain keeps pace with demand.
Working within the two hubs, the QA teams are responsible for ensuring correct stock availability and timely delivery to over 385 Poundland stores nationwide. Every box must be opened and samples of the goods checked. Type, quantity, colour and contents must all be cross referenced against the database in real time.
The rapid reconciliation with expected deliveries and flagging of any discrepancies is paramount. When discrepancies are found images must be taken for documentation, and as new items are taken into stock, they must be entered into the database. This was previously done with a cumbersome trolley-based system, including a laptop, scanner, camera and mobile battery pack.
In a warehouse where space is at a premium, this legacy solution not only impeded other warehouse tasks, such as fork lift truck operations, but the poor battery life meant constant trips to recharge, reducing the amount of work that could actually be done in a given shift.
In order to boost productivity and realise substantial cost savings on both the maintenance and support of the legacy solutions, Poundland turned to Box Technologies who specified a mobile computing solution built around the Motion F5 Tablet PC.
With an integrated camera, digitizer pen and barcode scanner, a single Motion F5 Tablet PC now does the job of the previous four separate pieces of hardware. The improved battery life has led to an increase in productivity as warehouse operatives use the tablet’s hot-swap battery feature to easily replace an existing battery with a charged battery while the tablet is operating, with no need to shut down or standby, all on the warehouse floor.
Mick Corbett, IT Solutions Leader, Poundland, commented, “Quality Assurance is a mission critical task. The Motion F5 Tablet PC has brought huge benefits in our abilities to check the quality of goods and the speed with which we do that. We have eliminated a bulky solution that inhibited warehouse operations with state of the art mobile technology in one lightweight and portable device.”
Nigel Owens, SVP of worldwide sales and general manager, Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), Motion Computing said, “Warehouse use of mobile technology is one of the quickest wins for retailers looking to streamline and accelerate back-end operations. It demands a rugged, specialised tablet that can not only withstand a challenging environment, but also include a wide range of optional hardware features and integrate seamlessly with established software like Windows®. The F5 Tablet PC achieves all this and in this deployment, has rationalised the technology footprint of the Poundland QA teams and improved productivity throughout two warehouses.”
Richard Elmes, marketing manager at Box Technologies commented, “In partnership with Motion, we deliver comprehensive solutions that offer customers a range of benefits based on industry leading tablet technology combined with a deep industry expertise and client understanding”. “We are delighted to hear how Poundland has deployed the solution to better insight into its business and how they have been able to derive such a broad range of tangible results.
Motion Computing
Comments are closed.