Albert Heijn Case Study
CASE STUDY
Albert Heijn implements voice-picking cking in distribution centres
“With the new voice-picking solution from Motorola’s Enterprise Mobility Business and Voxware at our distribution centres, we realised a five to ten per cent productivity increase in a few weeks, depending on the product range, said Boudewijn Canrinus, who is ” responsible for product innovation at Albert Heijn. “This is even more impressive when you consider that we had already achieved high labour productivity and a low picking error rate compared to competitors with our existing Motorola scanning solution. ”
The company: Albert Heijn Albert Heijn is a Dutch supermarket chain owned by the listed international group Ahold. It has head offices in Zaandam, The Netherlands. Albert Heijn employs a workforce of over 70,000 employees and realised a 6.5 billion euro turnover in 2006. The company runs almost 750 supermarkets that serve over 10 million customers every week. Its six Distribution Centres (DCs) are responsible for stocking all of its stores. The challenge: Maximising productivity and minimising errors Albert Heijn is an innovative supermarket chain with a highly-responsive supply chain. It maintains its competitive edge with advanced information and communications technologies, and business process optimisation. As a result, the company already had high productivity and a low picking error rate at its four regional and two national DCs. But, in order to achieve this, the picking team needs to constantly refer to their mobile computers both to receive information and to confirm their picks. This takes their eyes and their hands away from the picking locations, limiting the speed at which they can work and allowing room for error to occur. After following the developments in voice picking for several years, Albert Heijn believed that a solution from Motorola partners VoxWare and Van Boxtel could keep them remain at the forefront of retail innovation. However, Albert Hejin had to be
Albert Heijn implements voice-picking cking in distribution centres
“With the new voice-picking solution from Motorola’s Enterprise Mobility Business and Voxware at our distribution centres, we realised a five to ten per cent productivity increase in a few weeks, depending on the product range, said Boudewijn Canrinus, who is ” responsible for product innovation at Albert Heijn. “This is even more impressive when you consider that we had already achieved high labour productivity and a low picking error rate compared to competitors with our existing Motorola scanning solution. ”
The company: Albert Heijn Albert Heijn is a Dutch supermarket chain owned by the listed international group Ahold. It has head offices in Zaandam, The Netherlands. Albert Heijn employs a workforce of over 70,000 employees and realised a 6.5 billion euro turnover in 2006. The company runs almost 750 supermarkets that serve over 10 million customers every week. Its six Distribution Centres (DCs) are responsible for stocking all of its stores. The challenge: Maximising productivity and minimising errors Albert Heijn is an innovative supermarket chain with a highly-responsive supply chain. It maintains its competitive edge with advanced information and communications technologies, and business process optimisation. As a result, the company already had high productivity and a low picking error rate at its four regional and two national DCs. But, in order to achieve this, the picking team needs to constantly refer to their mobile computers both to receive information and to confirm their picks. This takes their eyes and their hands away from the picking locations, limiting the speed at which they can work and allowing room for error to occur. After following the developments in voice picking for several years, Albert Heijn believed that a solution from Motorola partners VoxWare and Van Boxtel could keep them remain at the forefront of retail innovation. However, Albert Hejin had to be