My name is Jimmy Felsenthal. I am the CIO and owner of Whitmore, Inc. Whitmore serves
the retail market of the US and around the world. We sell to Wal-Mart, Target, Kmart,
Sears, Kohl's, JC Penny as well as a lot of other smaller Mom and Pop type retailers.
My name is David Taylor. I am the network administrator and IT manager here at Whitmore, Inc.
The size of the facility is about 250,000 square foot. We have 8 access points
right now and we are looking to add a few more with some more racks.
We started the process to look for warehousing software because we really did not know where
our product was out in the warehouse. It was basically tribal knowledge as to we had to
find the right person to hopefully know where something was so when we are picking orders,
it was in the hopes that we could find it and would sometimes take a long time to find
it. The implementation of the iTRAK product now allows us to know exactly where everything
is out there. So we can look up in the system, and find anything in any location at any time
with great accuracy.
The picker will actually go get the product from that location and they will put it on their
badge and what that does is they wll take it from the location itself and puts it wherever
that person is going to be moving around on that either pallet jack or a forklift itself.
Once I am in the staging area and we are beginning to pick these orders, we will scan
the bar code on the pick ticket itself and then we will start moving product into individual
pallets. What they do then, they will actually work the product in an order, they will put
it on pallets and get everything shrunk wrapped, get labels on there and then they will do
what we call a pre-ship which actually moves it from a staging location out to a shipping
lane and from there, we can ship the product right out the door.
We do cycle counts to keep it accurate with the system. We do the RF scanning that was
implemented through SATO and just has helped us tremendously.
Presently our existing system run on an Access database and iTRAK runs on a sequel server
which is very good because they talk to each other very easily and another thing was that
we were actually able to bring up iTRAK with Sequel Server Express which is a free version
from Microsoft which allowed us to get up and running very quickly at a very low cost.
One of the biggest benefits that we have seen out of the iTRAK system is that when we do
a physical inventory once a year, what used to take us 4 to 5 days to do a complete physical
inventory, now we take it in 1 or 1.5 days. The only reason it takes a little bit longer
than a day is that it takes longer to scan all the items in the racks because you are
having to move up and down and it took a lot more space. But other than that, we are down
to about 1 day and doing a complete physical inventory in a 200-220,000 square foot warehouse.
When we first started with SATO, they were just consulting and looking at our racks,
looking at our space and how we needed to utilize it better. We did not have a good
grasp on that. Once we got into where the inventory was going to go, we started talking
to SATO about the iTRAK system and how it could help us do things more automated. We
also got into the consumables where we actually use 4 x 6 labels, 4 x 2 labels, thermal printers
that we use; we get from SATO as well as the ribbons.
SATO has been a very good partner for us. I would highly recommend the use of SATO for
many reasons, for the consulting services, for the hardware, for the software, the ability
and the knowledge they have as a company to totally integrate all these processes for
any customer of theirs.