J & K Aquatics is one of the largest nationwide distributors in the UK Aquatic trade.
Paul and Judy James started the company approximately 30 years ago with another couple in partnership – originally from home, before moving to their first premises in Wellington Garden Centre.
For many years now the company has grown to the size it is with over 70 employees. J & K Aquatics has 6 regional sales people covering most parts of the UK and Ireland and a fleet of 9 trucks and 2 vans delivering to customers on a weekly basis.
J&K is now building a new 35000 sq. ft. purpose built distribution centre with 4 loading bays on a 2.5 acre site on junction 24 of the M5. The new building motivated J & K to take a close look at their materials handling, especially the picking process.
Having made various modifications to how the items on a customer order appeared on the picking list over the years – in alpha numerical order on their codes (customers invariably ordered products in a random way and this is used to put similar products together) then to picking in bin location order to suit the walk pattern used in the warehouse – J & K considered going from paper lists to voice recognition in order to work more accurately and without relying on someone’s product knowledge.
“Having visited a logistics show, we saw a couple of systems that were offering voice picking solutions”, remembers Paul James, Managing Director of J&K Aquatics. “Having been an engineering apprentice that started his working life as a skilled man at 20 years old running 6 CNC milling machines with 6 operators, I suppose I’ve always had a pretty good idea what computers can do and I have always carried that through into running my own company.”
Having come away from the logistics show there were two companies that were in the running – topVOX being one of the two. “Having had a couple of meetings with the other company it was pretty obvious that they were a computer software set up that had an association with someone that produces some equipment capable of voice recognition”, notes Paul James. “When we had the first visit from Phil Oliver from topVOX, I instantly knew that he was someone that had been involved in the logistics industry for many years and had long-term experience with picking, packing and distribution processes. Someone that talked and understood the same language as me.
topVOX also had supplied one of our main suppliers in Germany, a company called Tetra, with their picking equipment and for a good many years Tetra had been one of those companies we didn’t suffer with picking errors. So this in itself was a pretty meaningful recommendation that Lydia® from topVOX worked.”
J&K Aquatics decided in favour of the Lydia Plug&Play solution – a preconfigured out of the box voice picking package for small and medium-sized businesses with up to 25 users. The Plug&Play package is based on standard components and processes. It makes implementing voice picking extremely easy as well as very affordable.
After running a workshop with J & K Aquatics and their WMS provider, everyone was defined and agreed on the interface and the process for picking.
“topVOX worked very hard to make sure we were comfortable with how we put the system in and how we were going to set about it. We also had a site visit to a topVOX customer running 70 operators on three shifts and it was commendable what they were doing”, remembers Paul James.
J & K’s IT department, together with input from the topVOX team, installed all necessary cabling for the RF network and the charging points. According to Paul James, the whole implementation process then was seamless. “All of the mobile voice clients and headsets turned up with the access points and the server it was all going to run on. And then, on one Tuesday morning, the topVOX team invaded Somerset. They installed and tested the system in the morning and trained our operators in the afternoon. On the second day they monitored what we were doing until their flight time back home, and made some minor adjustments that we wanted to the process which they did ‘on the fly’ as it only takes seconds to do with the Lydia Plug & Play solution.”
Another important advantage of topVOX’s voice solution Lydia® is the speaker independent recognition, which means the system does not require any speech training. “I could take someone off the street and have them productive and accurate pretty much immediately with the topVOX system. It just works” confirms Nigel Webber, Operations Manager.
J & K’s main objective of going to voice recognition was to improve pick accuracy and in turn do away with expensive mistakes that were also costing them time to sort things out when customers phoned in if they were on the wrong side of the ‘ordered a product that was sent wrong’ equation.
“Before the voice system we experienced about 8 errors per week, since then we have only had a couple of errors across the last 9 months”, resumes James. “We have since expanded the system by 30% as we have grown and this was as easy as just buying additional voice clients.
At this point I will also make a very relevant point that anyone who runs a company and is responsible for making decisions about IT software and equipment will appreciate – This was a project costing us just over £30k with VAT. It was refreshing to deal with a company that was confident in its ability to provide us with something that we were going to be more than happy to pay for when the invoice did eventually turn up instead of the normal pay a load up front for something that is probably never worth what you are being asked to pay for it.”
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