Since 1948, Liberty Hardware has manufactured and distributed decorative and functional home decor products. Today they distribute their products to home centers, mass-retail and e-commerce customers across North America. In 2019, Liberty experienced a spike in e-commerce sales that further increased in the years that followed. Along with increased order volume, their lead times shrunk from 48 hours to 24 hours to same-day shipment.
For a company manually allocating and picking orders in addition to a experiencing a 25% turnover rate, maintaining the status quo became unattainable. “We have cut offs at 12 o’clock and one o’clock and those orders have to ship the same day. We ship over 2,000 orders in a shift,” explains Katie Young, Sr. Manager of Operations at Liberty Hardware.
OIA Rose To The Top
Operations leadership at Liberty Hardware started researching providers whose solution would not require infrastructure changes to the building, was user-friendly and that was flexible and scalable to enable them to meet today’s demand as well as whatever the future would bring.“Ocado Intelligent Automation was the company that rose to the top every time we answered, ‘what problem are we trying to solve,?’” shared Miles Poole, VP of Operations and Planning. Liberty was impressed with OIA's ability to manage five of the six steps their team defines in their order picking process.
Results
Since implementing OIA, Liberty Hardware has improved training speed significantly. Training new hires only requires half an hour instead of a week of time or more. They doubled their pick rates and their employee turnover rate decreased by 88%. Additionally, the team is thrilled to have access to data visualization.
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