The Dunkin' Donuts Mid-Atlantic DC in Westampton, N.J., is designed to keep people and products moving efficiently:

• receiving happens on the left side of the building, and shipping happens on the right side, so receiving and shipping personnel don't compete for dock space;
• picking and replenishment take place in alternating aisles, so pickers and replenishers don't interfere with each other's work; and
• voice technology keeps pickers' eyes and hands free, letting them move swiftly and safely from task to task.

Receiving: Bags of doughnut mix, boxes of coffee cups and other Dunkin' Donuts products arrive at the DC's receiving docks [ 1 ] 24 hours a day. Receivers use handheld RF devices to record “use by” dates and quantities, label the loads with a unique pallet label, and then scan them into putaway status.

Putaway:Lift truck drivers are then alerted that pallets are ready for putaway. The drivers pick up the loads and put them away as instructed by the warehouse management system (WMS). (Putaway instructions and confirmations are currently relayed by handheld RF devices, but lift truck drivers will soon be outfitted with voice headsets.)

Products are stored in one of the DC's picking areas [ 2 ] or in floor reserve [ 3 ]. Fast movers and bulky dry goods—such as 50-pound bags of sugar and buckets of shortening—are picked from floor storage, while medium- and slow-moving products—right down to the paperclips and other office supplies needed in Dunkin' Donuts stores—are picked from pallet flow rack.

Replenishment: When pick locations reach a minimum inventory level, the WMS instructs lift truck drivers to replenish the locations. Drivers either move products over from floor reserves, or they move products down from reserve storage slots located above the flow rack.

Picking: Order pickers handle one store order at a time. Voice headsets direct picking as operators travel through the facility with triple pallet jacks, building three pallet loads simultaneously.

The voice system directs pickers to a location, and they vocally confirm the location when they arrive. The system then tells them how many items to pick from that location. The pickers decide which products go on which of their three pallets. As they vocally confirm their picks, they tell the system where they placed the product (on pallet A, B or C).

When pallet loads are complete, the pickers stage the loads at the shipping dock [ 4 ].

Completion of the last pallet in an order triggers the printing of shipping labels for all the pallets in that order. Pickers stop at the office to get the shipping labels, manually stretch wrap each of their pallets and then apply the shipping labels to the wrapped pallet loads.

Loading: Trailer loading is also voice-directed. When trailers arrive at the dock, loaders voice the door number and trailer number to confirm the trailer is at the correct loading door. As they load the trailers, loaders tell the system which pallets they're loading at which door, and the system confirms the right pallets are entering the right trailers in the right sequence.

Dunkin' Donuts