A Cruise Through Our Most Recent Customer Site Visit
Our team recently paid a visit to our long-time customer, International Cruise Food & Hotel Suppliers. Visits like this help us better understand how our customers leverage ScanForce in the warehouse to ensure we address all their needs, from the back office to the team operating our devices in the warehouse.
While many of our team members have personal hands-on experience with ScanForce from their previous roles, every warehouse operation is different, and the more exposure to real-life examples of ScanForce in action they have, the better equipped they are to understand and serve all of our customers’ needs.
An Impressive Operation
Providing personalized food items and food service supplies to major cruise lines at all the major cruise ports in South Florida is no small order. ICFH operates out of a 100,000-square-foot warehouse located in the heart of Miami, not far from ScanForce HQ.
As large as the warehouse is and as many SKUs as they have, we were impressed at how organized and tidy things are, with forklifts effortlessly clipping along their routes as they do their part to ensure cruisers all over the world are well-fed.
Running a Tight Ship
Cruise ships can’t delay their departure if the food they plan to serve to the passengers is late to arrive. So it’s imperative that orders are fulfilled in a timely and accurate manner. Some of the ways ScanForce helps them keep cruising along include:
- Label Printing: Labels are generated and printed in the warehouse, then placed on the bottom of a pallet to allow them to pull items from the top of the pallet without losing the label.
- Lot Tracking: When shipping perishable items, it’s imperative to ship older items first to prevent waste due to expired products. ScanForce’s Lot Tracking lets them easily track which items should be prioritized for shipping.
- Restock from Sales Order: To help them avoid overstocking, they can see the current demand for items based on Sales Orders and compare those numbers to inventory on hand in the picking area to determine the appropriate reorder quantities.
- Wave Picking: There are multiple sales orders associated with any given cruise. Adding them to a wave allows them to be picked as if they were one order to avoid numerous trips to the same item location.
- Pick to Pallet: Just about everything in the warehouse operations is pallet-driven. Using Pick to Pallet, the users drive around in forklifts with pallets and start building the pallets as they pick.
- Directed Picking: They want to create a pallet that’s ready to go, so they use a Directed Picking customization that lets them begin building the pallets with the “base items” that should go on the bottom of the pallet. This helps avoid the need to reorganize the pallet before shipping.
We appreciate Nicole Cano, Raul Sanchez, and the team at International Cruise Food and Hotel Suppliers for their ongoing partnership and for showing us how it all happens!
