Helping RSPB Handle 250% Spike in Orders During Pandemic

In this podcast we chat to Wayne Martin, Operations Manager at RSPB about:

The impact of the Covid crisis on RSPB
How they've managed to handle a 250% spike in online orders
How they've managed to improve productivity AND keep workers safe
How Maginus OMS has helped

Duration: 11 minutes

For more information about our work with the RSPB watch our latest video case study. - https://www.maginus.com/imagine/videos/RSPB/

Transcript

Janice: Right, question number one… so Wayne how has the Covid crisis affected the RSPB business?

Wayne: Due to the lockdown RSPB had to close all their reserves, and on each of the reserves is a store, and what that did was push the demand through the warehouse - online. We had an uplift in web sales of 250% of what we'd normally be getting this time of year. So, we had the challenges of picking a lot more orders (with less people). I couldn't increase the head count due to the social distancing issues that we were going through. So, we had to to use the system and we had to work quickly because the orders were coming in so fast. We had to work quickly on different ideas of how we could manipulate Maginus OMS to work for us faster. So what we were able to do is take the order pool and manipulate it so we could pull out orders that were in certain aisles which allowed us to put in place the social distancing measures in place – so we weren’t overcrowding one aisle with say 10, 15 pickers at a time. We were able to spread the pickers out. It's about keeping that two metre distancing rule in place…. We bought in a small cleaning station… all the stations now have perspex between them to ensure that we've got as much social distance in as possible and I think it's paid off.

When you look at the things that are going on in Leicester at the moment - they've gone back into lockdown - and they’re claiming some of their work areas are just carrying on as normal - and they've seen a spike. So we've done everything that we can to ensure that we're not flooding the place with people we're spreading them out and we've delivered more, with the same. So it's it's been a win-win. On average we'd have around about two pickers per aisle covering around about 18 bays. So there’s plenty of space for them to do the social distancing - no bottlenecking or bumping into each other which allowed us to actually increase our productivity.

Janice: So you've had to reduce the number of pickers per aisle and you've had this massive increase in orders so how have you actually increased the productivity?

Wayne: What [Maginus OMS] did was it [allowed] us to reduce the pickers travel time. So rather than the picker going out with say five orders and he would be picking the five orders throughout the eight or nine racks that we pick from. We were able to narrow it down so that the pickers were picking a lot quicker than they'd normally do. So we're having to take time out to to manipulate the system, but what Maginus has allowed us to do is alter the way that we could release the orders.

Another report that Maginus was able to give us - is what we call a “hit list” or a heat map - which could identify how many times we were visiting a location. If we're not visiting a location and it was sitting outside the footprint. Maginus would show us the most economic footprint to finish the pick.

To view the full transcript visit: https://www.maginus.com/imagine/articles/podcast-rspb-250-spike/