TGW expertise gives a boost to home electronics specialist Jasco
(Grand Rapids, 14 June 2022) At the end of April, Jasco, a consumer electronics and lighting company, celebrated the go-live of their fulfillment center in Oklahoma City. The customer, as well as the engineer-procure-construct (EPC) partner Burns & McDonnell and warehouse automation specialist TGW Logistics Group, celebrated the project's successful completion. The highly automated system will increase Jasco’s productivity and improve ergonomics for employees, helping alleviate some of the many staffing challenges increasingly faced by companies nationwide.
Over the course of the past few months, TGW augmented the existing fulfillment center with a powerful, future-proof system that lays the foundation for Jasco’s future growth. The integrated system was implemented during live, ongoing operation, ensuring Jasco successfully maintained its day-to-day business throughout the entire process.
At the fulfillment center, incoming trucks are manually unloaded in the receiving area, and cases are put onto takeaway conveyors and transported to the inbound sortation loop. Employees manually stack sorted single SKU cases onto individual pallets that are then stored in the high-bay warehouse as bulk reserve inventory. The heart of the installation is a four-aisle TGW Stingray shuttle system that stores and transports goods for order picking. Connected to the shuttle system are two high-speed, ergonomic TGW PickCenter One workstations where orders are picked into totes. These 1:1, goods-to-person stations improve the speed, efficiency, and accuracy of picking operations for Jasco by completely eliminating walking during the picking process.
Once picked, order totes are either directly transported to the packing area or are temporarily staged in the shuttle system until resources are available in the packing area. At pack-out, orders are put into larger conveyable cartons and then closed and labeled for tracking purposes. After pack-out, order cartons are temporarily stored in the shuttle system until all packed out cartons and full cases for a given order are buffered and ready for palletization. Completed customer orders are then sent to one of three TGW SlotStax semi-automatic palletizing workstations where operators ergonomically build B2B customer orders onto pallets and prepare the pallets for shipping. The entire flow of goods and its complex processes are controlled by TGW Warehouse Software.
Jacob Rodriguez, Chief Operating Officer at Jasco, underlines: “The choice was clear, the Burns & McDonnell and TGW program that we have put together absolutely delivers all of the key performance indicators we were targeting. We also know that the jobs most impacted by the move to automation will be safer, more ergonomic, and easier to cross-train, offering our employees a wealth of different skills and experiences.”
After the go-live, Jasco will continue to trust in TGW's expertise and experience through a five-year full-service contract. The specialists of TGW's Lifetime Services will ensure that the highly automated system runs smoothly, reliably, and at full performance 24-7.
