A person, working as quickly as possible, could pick a maximum of 400 lines per day. Tacony purchased six horizontal carousels from Remstar International Inc., a manufacturer of automated material handling and storage systems, based in Westbrook, Maine. Each carousel is a system of horizontally rotating shelves, suspended from a guide track that moves under computer control. Light trees tell the picker the location and quantity to pick, and a sort bar tells the picker into which orders to place the picked items. The carousels helped bring additional organization to the St. Louis facility.
Inventory is logged into and maintained by the company's mainframe computer.
Every item in the warehouse has a specific location. Now, each item is brought to the picker, saving more than 50 percent of the picking time. In addition, the system allows orders to be batched together. When an order prints in the warehouse, we batch the tickets together, picking 12 orders at a time on the vacuum carousels. Sixteen orders can be scanned at once into the company's mainframe and downloaded to a PC residing at the appropriate carousel.