The company reimagined warehouse management with IoT-powered man, machine and material tracking, enabling 20% increase in operational efficiency

Client background

Client:  A top American manufacturer of semiconductor products

Industry: Manufacturing

Area of operations: Worldwide

Products: Semiconductor and infrastructure software products

Employees: Over 11,000

Challenge

The manufacturer’s productivity was challenged due to warehousing inefficiencies. Lack of visibility into inventory, asset and manpower as well as inefficient warehouse processes like picking and put-away were resulting in lesser throughput, thus impacting their overall operational efficiency. The client identified key areas where they wanted to make changes to transform their warehouse operations.

• Productivity improvement: Reducing material movement that would lead to accurate and faster processes
• Space utilization: Space savings by improving pick-plan efficiency
• Process efficiency: Improve processes with automated assignment allocation and route suggestions for picking
• Asset tracking:  Real-time location tracking of asset and workforce
• Environment monitoring of entire warehouse

Solution

The manufacturer needed a partner with the expertise to manage end-to-end transformation of their warehouse. Wipro’s knowledge of the client’s business and decades of experience meeting similar needs of clients enabled a quick and seamless transformation. The Wipro team came up with an Integrated Smart Warehouse solution using IoT technology for Man, Machine and Materials tracking. Standard Operating Procedures were defined to reduce event/issue times. Some of the key features of the solution were:

• A unified warehousing solution that integrated easily with the existing warehouse and inventory management system
• Availability of real-time dashboards (KPIs) with alerts and notifications to stakeholders for timely action
• Environment monitoring capability to avoid loss of inventory

Business Impact

The new warehousing solution secured many firsts for the client. With ready information at their fingertips, the client had real-time access to inventory, asset, and manpower, and could easily measure the efficiency and productivity of resources engaged in picking, packing and shipping processes. The integration with the existing systems ensured that there were no sudden changes.

Some of the key benefits realized were:

• 20% increase in operational efficiency as a result of faster picking and put away processes
• End-to-end view of all warehouse operations in real-time
• 10% improvement in productivity – with man, machine and material visibility and elimination of idle and unwanted movements
• Higher throughput of 2200 shipments per day from earlier count of 1800
• Enhanced space utilization due to the change to a 10-day pick plan instead of 30 days

“Our team took complete responsibility of the client’s warehouse operations, integrating old with the new. And while we helped them re-imagine their warehouse processes, our client was able to focus on their end customer experiences driving customer successes and living up to their name in innovation, collaboration and engineering excellence.“

Ashish Khare, General Manager, Cloud Infrastructure Services - IoT, Wipro