Odyssey team develops warehouse management system for Harris CIS

Within the long-term cooperation with Odyssey consulting company, Harris CIS LLC integrates Odyssey WMS with mobile data collection terminals. The project will simplify the work of warehouse personnel, especially during peak workload periods, and bring logistics of the trade and manufacturing company to a new level. The project of mobile data collection terminals implementation was caused by expansion of Harris CIS LLC product line. As a consequence, the company needed to optimize order picking processes and reduce labor costs of warehouse personnel. In addition, the terminals are a logical complement to the warehouse management system based on Microsoft Dynamics AX, which Harris CIS launched together with Odyssey several years ago.

Until recently, warehouse employees worked only with paper documents. The technology was supported by the current system and suited the company well. This year, new pasta production lines are being opened at the Harris CIS plant near Moscow. The increase in production volume will affect both the speed and the quality of work of the warehouse staff. Especially taking into account the fact that employees spend up to a third of their working time only on transfers, namely for receiving tasks and registering them in the system upon completion. The Odyssey team offered Harris CIS a rational solution to the above problems. Automatic identification of company's products by means of mobile terminals will significantly reduce time needed for standard warehouse processes. In particular, using data collection terminals, the company already accepts incoming goods from production and external suppliers, warehousing, restocking, and stock-taking of warehouse inventory.

Several times a day we receive finished products from our own plant and from our foreign partners. Previously, in each such case, staff manually entered data about the incoming goods in the system. Now we spend a minimum of time and effort to register products: by scanning barcodes, all the names and quantities of received goods almost instantly appear in the accounting system, and sales managers can immediately place orders for them.

Yaroslav Prikhodko, head of the Harris CIS IT department

Along with increasing the labor productivity of the warehouse staff, the introduction of mobile terminals will help the Harris CIS warehouse to reduce the number of errors in product handling that are due to human error. Now every warehouse employee armed with a POS knows precisely where and in what quantity to process the required goods at any given time. Thanks to mobile equipment, the staff makes fewer mistakes in their work. And this means that the trading and manufacturing company will be able to provide faster and better service to its customers. The system also promptly displays information on what the warehouse staff is busy with.

It is possible to keep track of what activities and with what goods they performin Odyssey WMS based on Microsoft Dynamics AX. Harris CIS sells a wide range of food products, most of which require compliance with certain storage and handling conditions. Manual management of the processes of goods movement in the warehouse is rather labor-intensive and economically unprofitable for the company. Using data collection terminals in addition to the existing Odyssey WMS information system, Harris CIS will be able to further increase staff productivity and improve the accuracy of routine operations with goods comments.

Vladimir Puchenkov, director of Odyssey Warehouse Management