Case Study GTS Freight Management
GTS Freight Management is a family owned business founded in 1980. Based in Mildura GTS has a fleet of 101 prime movers and 125 B Double Trailers. With warehousing operating over two sites, their new purpose built fleet management centre and existing site has more than 21,000 m2 of insulated warehousing specifically designed to meet the requirements of the Australian wine industry.
After winning the national contract to warehouse and distribute the products for one of Australia’s major wine producers, GTS knew they needed a system that they could rely upon to manage their stock. Having seen the PW system previously Steve Cornale, the Warehouse Manager, called Paperless Warehousing immediately.
“The Paperless Warehouse Management System is what we needed to assist us in meeting our customer’s requirements and goals. The benefits in stock rotation, inventory control & real-time stock availability greatly assisted us in our warehouse management and therefore made the decision an easy choice,” said Steve.
Within a few weeks and after consultation with the Paperless Warehousing people, GTS had purchased a server to house the Paperless WMS, not only for their current requirements but also for future growth.
In no time the system was setup to suit the needs of GTS, the client and the physical site, process flows were agreed, SOPs written and the onsite training had commenced. Paperless Warehousing installed the latest version of their MR2 software based on .Net (PWNetClient) during November 2007.
“The new .Net version is fantastic. The graphs and reports you can now get help me manage the warehouse better. It gives you a better idea of KPI’s of all the staff. The reports are of great value when attending KPI meetings with our client as monthly volumes and productivity figures are only a mouse click away” said Steve.
GTS went live without an interface to the client’s host as a new host system was planned to be implemented later in the year.
Initially, all the orders were entered manually by Michael Lawrence (Inventory Supervisor) and Matt Adams (Despatch Scheduler). Sometimes entering up to 50 orders daily with hundreds of separate lines.
Other day-to-day job functions also included releasing orders with thousands of cartons needing to be picked and despatched to major customers like Woolworths, LiquorLand, ALM, ILG, Dan Murphy’s as well as hundreds of smaller retailers.
“Michael Lawrence and I made sure the inbound storage loads were also to be entered into WMS as Purchase Orders and receipted by the storemen via the RF devices. The WMS system made our jobs easy day in day out. The training, Go Live support along with the continued support from all the guys at Paperless Warehousing was fantastic.” Matt said.
Another major phase was the interface between Paperless and JDE. The Paperless WMS was required to interface with the client’s system for Sales Orders, Purchase Orders, ASN’s and Stock Reconciliations. After initial configuration and some testing, the client’s new host system was changed over to JDE on the 2nd of January.
“We no longer had to key in the Sales or Purchase Orders; this made life easier as all the information was there ready for us.” Michael and Matt said.
Currently storing between 4,000 and 6,000 pallets, receiving around 9,000 cartons per day, and picking around the same amount GTS now employs 10 store persons.
The Paperless WMS uses RF terminals across all activities within the warehouse including receipt, putaway, replenishment, picking and cycle counting. Every order picked is updating the system in real-time.
Additional despatch information like Despatch Labels, Packing Slips and if required a GS1 compliant Pallet Labels are also produced dynamically from the Paperless WMS. GTS also manages stock in Sydney, Brisbane and Perth through the one instance of Paperless.
The latest End of Financial Year stocktake was solely conducted on RF. As all the orders were completed Dave Moore and Wayne Hamilton (Warehouse Supervisors) assembled 8 store persons and commenced counting at 10:30 am. Having counted 4,500 pallets (381,181 cartons) the variance reports were run and second counts commenced. By 1 pm, the stock take was completed. The final results were posted with a 2- carton variance. “Believe it or not 1 carton up of Sangiovese, 1 carton down of Spumante” Michael Lawrence said.
“GTS are one of the market leaders in transport having implemented a GPS tracking system in all of the fleet and now have “a WMS that compliments the transport system which makes GTS a leader in Transport, Warehousing and Distribution”, Steve said.