Case Study: Puerto Rico Supplies Group
Company Size
1,000+
Region
- America
Country
- Puerto Rico
Product
- Vocollect
- Voxware
- Zebra hardware
- VoxPilot
Tech Stack
- SaaS-based Cloud VMS
- On-premise implementation
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Cost Savings
- Customer Satisfaction
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
- Functional Applications - Remote Monitoring & Control Systems
- Functional Applications - Warehouse Management Systems (WMS)
Applicable Industries
- Consumer Goods
- Food & Beverage
Applicable Functions
- Logistics & Transportation
- Warehouse & Inventory Management
Use Cases
- Inventory Management
- Predictive Maintenance
- Warehouse Automation
Services
- Software Design & Engineering Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
Puerto Rico Supplies Group (PRSG) is a leading total channel, total category distributor of major brands imported from all over the world, including food items, consumer packaged goods, and premium spirits. PRSG offers major retailers and small mom-and-pop shops a wide range of products, all housed in and distributed from the company’s 250,000 square foot distribution center. Over the last 20 years, PRSG has experienced tremendous growth in large part due to their focus on perfecting distribution operations which enabled the company to distribute faster and more cost-effectively than their competitors. The PRSG team consolidated their operation from 8 distribution centers spread across the island into a single facility located in the San Juan area. Next, they replaced their paper-based picking process with voice automation from Vocollect.
The Challenge
The PRSG team implemented a voice-directed picking workflow with their old voice provider in 2010. After a few years, the PRSG team learned one of the harsh truths about technology vendors. “It’s not enough to find a great technology,” said Carlos Falcon, Distribution Center Director, PRSG. “It’s just as important to find a great partner. Unfortunately, we just didn’t have a great partnership with our first voice vendor so we decided to begin searching for a new one.” Falcon and the PRSG team wanted to drive further productivity improvements by implementing a replenishment workflow, but they were unable to get the project started with their previous vendor. Additionally, the hardware they used was approaching the end of its useful life and their contract with their former voice provider required PRSG to shoulder the costly burden of replacing the outdated devices. In 2015, the PRSG team started looking for a way to mitigate the cost of the hardware upgrade and began vetting new voice providers.
The Solution
At the top of the PRSG team’s must-have list was advanced real-time visibility. “With our old voice provider, we were highly restricted in the kind of analysis and reports we could access,” said Falcon. “Most data was not accessible until the next day, by which time it was too late to make corrections. Productivity is our number one metric. It’s how we serve our customers and it’s a key factor for compensating our pickers.” As PRSG narrowed their search, they found that Voxware was the only voice provider that offered easily accessible real-time visibility into distribution operations as a standard feature. A second key factor in the decision process was Voxware’s hardware replacement program. Since Voxware offers both SaaS-based Cloud VMS and on-premise implementation options, PRSG could choose a deployment model that worked best for their operation without a substantial upfront capital investment. The subscription model also includes the most up-to-date version of Zebra hardware, which meant PRSG eliminated the need for an expensive out-of-pocket hardware replacement. “Having access to the latest hardware addresses one of the key issues we were having with our previous voice provider as we were hesitant to make such a large financial investment only to have to repeat this process in the future,” said Falcon. “Having the latest Voxware software and Zebra hardware while controlling our costs is something that we had hoped, but didn’t expect, to find during this vetting process.”
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
Case Study missing?
Start adding your own!
Register with your work email and create a new case study profile for your business.
Related Case Studies.
.png)
Case Study
Improving Vending Machine Profitability with the Internet of Things (IoT)
The vending industry is undergoing a sea change, taking advantage of new technologies to go beyond just delivering snacks to creating a new retail location. Intelligent vending machines can be found in many public locations as well as company facilities, selling different types of goods and services, including even computer accessories, gold bars, tickets, and office supplies. With increasing sophistication, they may also provide time- and location-based data pertaining to sales, inventory, and customer preferences. But at the end of the day, vending machine operators know greater profitability is driven by higher sales and lower operating costs.
Case Study
The Kellogg Company
Kellogg keeps a close eye on its trade spend, analyzing large volumes of data and running complex simulations to predict which promotional activities will be the most effective. Kellogg needed to decrease the trade spend but its traditional relational database on premises could not keep up with the pace of demand.
Case Study
HEINEKEN Uses the Cloud to Reach 10.5 Million Consumers
For 2012 campaign, the Bond promotion, it planned to launch the campaign at the same time everywhere on the planet. That created unprecedented challenges for HEINEKEN—nowhere more so than in its technology operation. The primary digital content for the campaign was a 100-megabyte movie that had to play flawlessly for millions of viewers worldwide. After all, Bond never fails. No one was going to tolerate a technology failure that might bruise his brand.Previously, HEINEKEN had supported digital media at its outsourced datacenter. But that datacenter lacked the computing resources HEINEKEN needed, and building them—especially to support peak traffic that would total millions of simultaneous hits—would have been both time-consuming and expensive. Nor would it have provided the geographic reach that HEINEKEN needed to minimize latency worldwide.
Case Study
Energy Management System at Sugar Industry
The company wanted to use the information from the system to claim under the renewable energy certificate scheme. The benefit to the company under the renewable energy certificates is Rs 75 million a year. To enable the above, an end-to-end solution for load monitoring, consumption monitoring, online data monitoring, automatic meter data acquisition which can be exported to SAP and other applications is required.
Case Study
Coca Cola Swaziland Conco Case Study
Coco Cola Swaziland, South Africa would like to find a solution that would enable the following results: - Reduce energy consumption by 20% in one year. - Formulate a series of strategic initiatives that would enlist the commitment of corporate management and create employee awareness while helping meet departmental targets and investing in tools that assist with energy management. - Formulate a series of tactical initiatives that would optimize energy usage on the shop floor. These would include charging forklifts and running cold rooms only during off-peak periods, running the dust extractors only during working hours and basing lights and air-conditioning on someone’s presence. - Increase visibility into the factory and other processes. - Enable limited, non-intrusive control functions for certain processes.
