New Warehouse Control System (WCS) for RS Components lowers order lead time to less than 2 hours
RS Components supplies electrical and electronic components, industrial tools, parts, equipment and a growing range of IT and health and safety related items. The company stocks 160,000 different product lines and makes these available by overnight delivery to over 1 million end-user customers world-wide.
For RS Components, quality of service is a vital business driver. To meet customer requirements, RS Components must ensure that all orders can be received, processed, picked, packed and dispatched in less than 2 hours. Throughput of the distribution center is around 30.000 orderlines per day. RS Components relies on the very best automated handling systems, software and business processes to ensure that its complex distribution operation works smoothly and efficiently 24 hours a day. The automated materials handling system was originally designed and installed by Vanderlande Industries in 1984. As RS Components has expanded, so the logistical complexities involved in achieving the level of service have increased. This led RS Components to examine its entire business software infrastructure.
Vanderlande was selected to supply an entirely new Warehouse Control System (WCS) because the company clearly demonstrated that it had the technical capability, the resources and the expertise to support and deliver the level of system availability required. The WCS is designed to maximise availability and minimise the possibility of service disruption. The entire change-over to the new WCS was achieved without interrupting ongoing operations. At a later stage, the host interfacing changed to SAP. As a certified SAP partner, Vanderlande also supported this re-engineering process perfectly in time without any interruption of the distribution processes.
For more detail please look at the article 'a vital component' on www.logisticsit.com
