Customer Success

The Acworth based warehouse and distribution center is a dynamic environment with high velocity inventory movement due to ongoing put-away, picks, item transfers and order fulfillment. This busy facility is responsible for processing thousands of rugs a month (underscoring the importance of precise inventory accuracy).

Due to the dense nature of the Jaipur Living inventory storage and high velocity movement, cycle counting was an arduous daily activity for the warehouse team. The inventory was so vast the team was forced to segment aisles into quadrants to satisfactorily document their stored goods. This task entailed RF scanner armed warehouse workers traversing up and down rack towers in order pickers. While this was taking place, Jaipur Living would close the area of the warehouse from any pick or put away activities. To satisfactorily record the inventory, it would take an entire week just to count a single quadrant. And even with this invested time, Jaipur Living’s inventory accuracy was still subpar.

“While attending Modex, our team learned about Vimaan,” added Schmid. “And after evaluating other automated cycle count solutions, we chose Vimaan as it offers several options in inventory management including cycle counting and dock door inventory capture. The solution Vimaan deployed was StorTRACK, their automated cycle counting solution.” Designed in the shape of a pallet, StorTRACK is easily lifted and maneuvered by all of Jaipur Living’s existing forklifts and order pickers. The Vimaan deployment team worked closely with Ryan’s team to understand their challenges to best develop a strategy for getting the most out of the StorTRACK system.

Unlike other cycle counting solutions, StorTRACK uses computer vision and machine learning algorithms to capture and process scanned inventory in highly dense racking. Because it possesses image-based capture capabilities, StorTRACK takes digital photographs of the inventory. These images are stored for months, allowing users to access this historical data in the Vimaan ViewDECK inventory visualization web application. Jaipur Living also benefitted from StorTRACK’s ability to scan and count repeat SKUs instead of relying solely on barcodes.

With StorTRACK, historically Vimaan has seen a 15 to 20 times improvement in speed compared to legacy manual scanning methods. This, however, was not the case with Jaipur Living. “We experienced a 40X improvement in time to scan our inventory,” reports Schmid. “What used to take us a week to scan, now takes an hour…this has had a dramatic improvement in the way we now operate in the warehouse. Before StorTRACK, we would have to break the aisle into sections and shut the area down for several hours. Now we get done with an entire aisle and open it up after one hour, allowing our team to have greater access to our inventory. What used to take us a week, now takes us an hour with StorTRACK.” This increased access has reduced roadblocks in fulfilling outgoing orders and put away missions.

In addition to improving Jaipur Living’s speed in cycle counting, the team also reported improvements in their inventory accuracy. “I can say without a doubt that StorTRACK has almost doubled our inventory accuracy.” says Schmid. “Our bin accuracy has improved from an average of 50% to 95% since deploying StorTRACK six weeks ago. And it continues to improve each week. Additionally, our overall accuracy has improved from the low-to-mid 70’s to consistently reporting in the mid-to high 90’s. Anybody responsible for inventory management understands the impact this will have on day-to-day operations.”

Having access to digital images captured by StorTRACK in the ViewDECK application has also proven to be equally invaluable to Schmid and his team. “We can research variances a lot quicker as well. I know that if an item was put away on Tuesday and it’s not in our system on Wednesday, I can find out a lot easier what happened with ViewDECK — allowing us to resolve errors a lot quicker. This only works when we have great access to images in ViewDECK. Previously, when we discovered a discrepancy, it could take us 20-30 minutes to examine the racks – now we can do it from our chairs. And this has been valuable not only for inventory tracking, it has also allowed us to do our own detective work in other areas. During a visual inspection of the racks, we noticed damage on a particular rack and we were able look back in ViewDECK to better pinpoint when the damage had taken place.” The digitally captured inventory has also been instrumental in helping Jaipur Living identify inconsistencies with vendor labels and fixing damaged labels on the items. “By examining the photographs in ViewDECK, we now have a better understanding of which vendors are following our product labeling requirements and which ones are not. This is allowing us to put better safeguards in place — further improving our inventory management practices,” added Schmid.