August 2021 – Most of our customers around the world are gearing up for a hectic end to the year, with Black Friday Cyber Monday followed shortly after by the Christmas chaos. That would mean the summer months might be just a bit quieter, with some respite, and some time for forward planning.
However, for Just Hype, our long-term customer based in Leicester, England, that Peak is the ‘Back to School’ season, which means they were pumping out upwards of 3000 orders a day when we dropped in to pay them a visit and check out their ever-expanding warehouse space.
Parked up outside the distribution facility is the famous ‘HypeMobile’.
A brand that has grown remarkably over the past decade, Hype is a household name in the UK and worldwide, particularly with young people yearning for the coolest back-pack, snap-back or other brightly coloured accessories to go alongside their school uniform for the new academic year.
Whilst touring their warehouse, we’ve picked out a number of highlights and key learnings that we can share.
1. Leave yourself enough room for ‘shipped’ orders.
Hype keep a number of these high-volume wheeled trolleys on hand to store their ‘dispatched’ orders. When the courier arrives, they are taken straight over to the van for pick-up.
2. Work in pairs to double your packing speed.
When you’ve got thousands of orders to get out each day to hit those all important customer experience promises, scaling up the person-power is key. Here, on the right the warehouse team member is using Peoplevox to dispatch orders, scanning each of the items for one order to get the shipping label out through the Metapack integration. Once the items and the label are ready, she passes on to her colleague on the left, who takes on the job of packing the items into a Hype mailer parcel. By separating these two jobs across two people, you allow both team members to into a faster rhythm on their task, and increase your ‘orders dispatched’ rate without needing more users on the Peoplevox system.
3. Make best use of your locations with ‘dynamic storage’
Here we can see a mixed range of SKUs in one pickable location. It’s something Amazon have been doing for years, and has a wide range of benefits. Mainly, it means Hype are able to make better use of their space, stay flexible to make sure the closest pick locations to the pack stations are filled with popular items at the time, and put in another layer of protection from mispicks and human error.
4. Get screens up to track your progress.
With dashboards set up, Hype are able to see exactly where they’re at in the customer experience journey, order by order. It helps management see how things are progressing at a productivity level, and incentivises the pick, pack and ship team members to compete against in each in a positive working environment. This screen shows how many orders are dispatched for the day, and how many items still need to be picked in order to meet delivery timelines. They also have a specific field for Amazon orders still needing to be dispatched. This is a crucial metric to keep their eyes on, in order to maintain their excellent reputation as an Amazon SFP vendor.
5. Leave breaks in your pick face aisles.
{% video_player “embed_player” overrideable=False, type=’scriptV4′, hide_playlist=True, viral_sharing=False, embed_button=False, autoplay=False, hidden_controls=False, loop=False, muted=False, full_width=False, width=’1080′, height=’1920′, player_id=’52358814010′, style=” %}
If you have long aisles of continuous pick face, but your picker only needs to get one item from that aisle before moving to the next aisle, these gaps are a life-saver and a massive time saver. Without them, we would have had to walk all the way from one end to the other, and if you multiply this up across 100s of items and pickruns, you are adding hours and hours to the time spent walking, and taking time away from getting complete sets of orders back to pack.
