The story
The customer
Ideal Fulfillment is a 3PL founded in 2018 in Temecula, California. It serves clients with eCommerce orders and services such as kitting, from a 110,000 sq ft facility with about 25 regular warehouse staff. It ships roughly 1,000 orders a day, split evenly between parcel and freight.
The challenge
Before QBOID, packers captured dimensions and weights with tape measures and scales. It was slow, and the data was inconsistent; often dimensions were estimated or skipped. That showed up as:
- Wrong box sizes, and packaging material wasted
- Shipping savings missed, and shipping billed on inaccurate data
- Three pack stations needed to keep up with order volume
Ideal Fulfillment wasn't looking for a dimensioner when it found QBOID, and adopted it quickly.
The setup
Ideal Fulfillment put the M2 and the S1 at the centre of its pack station workflow and connected them to its WMS. What the case study and the photos show:
- Devices
- M2 Mobile Dimensioner on the S1 Accessory, with its scale and a barcode scanner
- Where
- One pack station, next to the on-demand box machine
- Captured per shipment
- Weight, dimensions and photos
- Where the data goes
- The WMS, and the on-demand box machine, which builds a right-sized carton from the dimensions
The box machine depends on the measurement: without accurate dimensions for each shipment, it couldn't size the boxes.
Results and how they were measured
Ideal Fulfillment reports that gathering dimensions and weights for a shipment takes over 80% less time than with tape and scale. The work of three pack stations now runs through one, without losing throughput, and order errors dropped to fewer than one a week.
The figures are Ideal Fulfillment's own: the time per shipment before and after, the number of pack stations, and order errors per week. The case study describes the other effects without putting numbers on them:
- Right-sized boxes and accurate weights lower shipping costs and packaging waste
- Fewer mis-picks and costly reshipments, because weights and dimensions are captured digitally
- Photos of each shipment add a check on order accuracy and back up client service
- Better use of labour, and faster fulfilment
The figures come from Ideal Fulfillment's published case study. Use of them here is Pending approval
What comes next
The M2 and S1 are now a core part of the pack station. As order volumes grow, Ideal Fulfillment plans to use them in more of its warehouse workflows and to expand the services it offers its clients.
