Challenge
As the home-building market and consumer demand for home renovation materials skyrocketed during the pandemic, fast and accurate order fulfillment became even more critical to cabinet manufacturer and distributor American Woodmark.
In order to keep up with high demand without compromising safety or accuracy, American Woodmark warehouse workers must use a picking solution that allows for both hands to move delicate cabinet doors more carefully, and their eyes up, able to look around their large picking carts instead of down at their instructions.
“Traditional warehouse systems don’t give you the Hands-Free, Eyes-Free™ capabilities that you get with the voice system, and as a result, your accuracy is impacted, your efficiency is impacted, and you lose some visibility,” says Greg Weigel, Senior Director, IT, American Woodmark.
Solution
American Woodmark has been using voice technology for pick-to-order in several distribution centers for more than 20 years. Mountain Leverage, their voice partner, takes a unique people-first approach to technology implementation, resulting in elevated experiences for American Woodmark order selectors. The engineering team at Mountain Leverage has designed American Woodmark’s voice solution to optimize work, reduce product touches, increase picking speed, boost order accuracy, and protect workers’ safety.
Most importantly, the Mountain Leverage voice solution puts the employee experience first, enabling higher performance and better labor retention rates even amid a tight labor market.
“Running around a warehouse or manufacturing plant is difficult on the worker, but our solution actually improves worker satisfaction,” says Mountain Leverage CEO Alex Reneman. “How our systems really help is, you can imagine somebody walking with you in the work environment, telling you where to go, like a GPS in your car. Plus, having a technology that’s native (like voice) in the workplace is effective and, when you’re looking at retention, provides an advantage.”
Results
American Woodmark continues to grow as a business because of nimble, streamlined technology processes and people-first solutions that allow for scalability, data visibility, and market responsiveness.
“The voice technology helps my team work safely and efficiently, as well as gives me a real-time snapshot of inventory so I can manage our business,” says Nathan Pritts, Materials Operations Manager, American Woodmark. “It also allows us to train a new hire very quickly.”
Not only do current workers perform better with voice, but new American Woodmark employees get up to speed much faster because the voice training process is tailored to their specific voice and uses intuitive voice dialogue.
Previously, workers took many weeks to learn a complex, coded shipping label to understand what parts are picked for what cabinets, often making mistakes when feeding production lines. The voice system enables someone with no product knowledge to pick by location and quantity, no product training required.
Supervisors can also follow along with what the operator is hearing through the system by using Mountain Leverage’s mobile app, VoiceSupervisor, on a tablet to monitor the performance, speed, and location of each worker.
Anchored on their shared values of elevating experiences for employees, customers, and business leaders alike, American Woodmark and Mountain Leverage have truly partnered to enable voice-picking solutions that improve business performance in the face of shifting market pressure, as well as beat the odds of global labor shortages by providing an optimal work environment with intuitive, efficient, and safe technology for workers.