Qpick case study: Bidfood
What the Bidfood team love most about Qpick
“In a word, accuracy. We have the capability to pick just over 600,000 items a night, six nights a week. And barcode scanning means we get those picks right.”
“We wanted the best solution with the best equipment. By working collaboratively, we ensured we got a solution that really worked.”
“It’s really improved the onboarding of new staff – the process is intuitive, so the learning curve is short.”
“Qpick has made our processes more efficient and more accurate. We’re picking so many items that just a little time saved with each one adds up to a huge difference.
“It’s intuitive, with a visual display backed up with audible confirmations, and it matches the type of equipment that employees might have experienced in different industries.”
“By spending time to get the deployment right, CSD have helped us get the processes and the people up to speed as well as the technology.”
Hear from Nathan Wildbore, Bidfood’s Head of Operations Change, about how Qpick has benefited the company
What is your vision for the future and how is Qnetex helping?
At Bidfood, we have a saying that if you’re not serving the customer directly, you’re serving someone who is. We want to deliver excellent customer service by cutting the complexity and harnessing technology to make our processes more and more efficient. To do that, we want to make sure that every selection is as accurate as possible.
By helping us harness and implement Qpick, Qnetex are enabling us to move beyond manual item selection, where there’s a possibility of human error, to an automated system that relies on barcode scanning. This eliminates ambiguity and significantly reduces missed picks.
Have there been any immediate benefits?
The most obvious and immediate benefit is speed. As we’re picking thousands and thousands of items a day, by streamlining every screen and ensuring the operator has the optimum amount of information, we can save seconds per pick. Multiply that across the number of picks and we are saving a huge amount of time.
What did the implementation involve?
We knew we wanted to use a visual interface with a hand-mounted scanner, while removing the need to touch the screen due to the challenges of using touchscreen technology in a sub-zero environment. So, we held a series of workshops with CSD, working together to explore wireframe designs, looking to streamline every screen so that operators could see the maximum amount of information and understand it easily.
The iterative process meant we were able to see Qpick and interrogate it as it was being built and suggest any changes that would suit our needs as we went. Instead of waiting for a product to be designed and built and then making changes to it, we took a lean approach and shaped it during the design process.
At the same time, we were also working with another supplier to introduce a new scanner, so we were able to introduce the new functionality in one fell swoop. And as it was developed to be fully functional, we could then roll it out across our 24 warehouses as it was all ready to go.
How important has CSD’s people-lead approach been for you?
When you carry out a deployment like this, it’s about trying to get the people, the processes and the technology aligned. You can source the best technology in the world or the sleekest of systems, but if you don’t change your processes and you don’t bring your people along with you, it simply won’t work. You’ll end up spending more time trying to fix things than you did on the deployment.
CSD know our processes and how we work, so they’ve been able to introduce the technology while making sure our people are all onboard and up-to-speed. They’re helping us cut out the complexity, while being technology led. That’s good news for our team and for our customers.
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