100,000 pallets scanned a month, and stock accuracy at 99.97%.

Background

Sentispec services a global shipping and logistics company that offers warehousing and distribution across Northern Europe. It is a third party logistics provider, not a retailer: the stock in its racking belongs to its clients, and many of those clients are well known retailers and manufacturers who require frequent, comprehensive stock audits of 30,000 to 100,000 pallets.

That distinction shapes everything about the problem. A retailer counting its own stock is trading counting cost against write off risk, and it can decide how much accuracy it wants to pay for. A 3PL is counting somebody else's stock to a standard somebody else set, on a contract that gets renewed or does not. Accuracy is a deliverable, and the labour to produce it comes out of a margin measured in single digits.

The challenge

• Stocktaking was manual, labour intensive and costly. Hand scanners move 50 to 100 pallets per hour, so a comprehensive audit of a large client account is a team exercise measured in days.
• Clients demanded accurate stock levels and efficient loading. An out of stock situation caused by a stock record that does not match the floor hits the client's revenue, and the client knows exactly whose warehouse it happened in.
• Frequent audits were consuming significant labour and time. The audits were not a once a year event to be absorbed. They repeated, per client, across a network of warehouses, and every one of them competed with put away and picking for the same people.

What changed

A recording unit is picked up by a forklift that is already working the site. The driver covers the aisles at normal travel speed, one shelf level at a time, and the camera reads every pallet label and registers every location, including the empty ones. Counted stock is reconciled against the WMS and returned as a discrepancy list, with the recording behind each line available as evidence a client or an auditor can look at.

At up to 3,000 units per hour, an audit that used to occupy a team for days is one driver for part of a shift. That is what made the audit schedule affordable rather than merely possible, and it is the whole of the change: the same audits, at the same frequency, without releasing a shift to run them.

The solution brings real change and efficiency from day one.

Head of Warehousing and DistributionGlobal 3PL, Northern Europe
Stock accuracy 99.97%, missing pallet labour down 95%

What is different about a 3PL

Three things separate a logistics provider from an own account warehouse. The first is that the audit is contractual, so the cost of counting is not discretionary and cannot be deferred to a quieter quarter. The second is that stock profiles change when clients change, and a counting method that needs new labels, fixed infrastructure or a system integration per account will always be behind the commercial team. Sentispec Inventory works out of the box on a stock file exchange, with a standard API available when it is wanted, so onboarding a new account is a configuration job rather than a project.

The third is that a 3PL usually has more than one warehouse. This network runs the same unit and the same method across sites, so the 6 to 8% productivity gain was measured across the network rather than at one building. Pricing follows that shape: the Network tier applies from five warehouses, and a wall to wall count or a client audit runs to the same five day deployment pattern at every site.

Sentispec runs retail and fashion sites in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands on the same pattern. Willebroek in Belgium reached 99.99% accuracy after implementation, a nine point accuracy gain, and renewed its contract.

See the ten published deployments and the method