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Seachill Case Study PDF download Visidot At Work – Seachill (UK) Ltd. .Seachill, now part of the Icelandic Group, was formed in 1998 to become one of the In early 2006, increasing customer demand for reduced lead time and faster shipping turnaround prompted Seachill to seek a solution that would enable it to automate its dispatch area and speed up its shipping and dispatching processes. “Tesco’s short lead times were proving to be a great challenge,” says Steve Wallace, Seachill’s IT Manager. “We’d get orders late in the day, leaving a very small window to get products scanned and out the door.” He goes on to explain how Seachill’s then active system – which primarily involved the use of handheld scanners and manual processing of outbound products – became a bottleneck that could potentially limit throughput on large product volumes. “Dispatch was having a hard time handling the influx of data during shipping peaks,making it very clear that we needed to research potential scanning and shipping automation solutions.” A number of options were considered, including RFID. However, the prohibitive cost of RFID tags, especially in the context of high volumes of relatively low-cost products, and concern over RFID’s potential sensitivity to the cold and damp conditions dominating the dispatch area deemed the technology impractical for Seachill’s needs. “After taking all of our requirements into consideration and researching competing products on the market, we believed ImageID’s Visidot to be the only solution that could meet our scanning accuracy, speed, tag cost-effectiveness and system flexibility needs,” says Mr. Wallace.
With help from ImageID, Seachill proceeded to tag a large portion of its fresh fish products with industry-standard Data Matrix (2D) labels. A Visidot gate with two readers – each of which is equipped with three high resolution cameras - an operator stand and Visidot SCT (Supply Chain Traceability) servers were then deployed at Seachill’s The Visidot reader gate, which is capable of capturing very large quantities of tagged containers in a single scan, now captures thousands of outbound fresh fish cases a day, effectively replacing the far slower and outage-prone handheld scanning performed previously. The locally deployed Visidot SCT servers running Visidot SCT Director software enable dispatch area operators to perform ad-hoc shipping verification and apply corrective measures should discrepancies between incoming orders and outbound pallet stacks be discovered. Scanning of an entire stack of fresh fish pallets takes mere seconds and, once orders and products to be shipped are properly matched and verified, the pallets are automatically shrink-wrapped and sent on their way. Tag information captured from all outbound fresh fish pallets is archived in image banks on the Visidot SCT servers, enabling future reference and easy production of proof of shipping or proof of product condition, if and when required. Seachill Application Benefits
Visidot Delivers “Visidot does exactly what ImageID said it would do,” says Steve Wallace. “ImageID’s support has been excellent, throughout both planning and implementation stages, and we have consistently managed to maintain 100% accuracy in all of the fresh fish deliveries handled by the system”. Visidot not only helps Seachill avoid shipping errors in the first place, but also provides dispatch operators with guidance, should corrective actions be required. Mr. Wallace adds, “Per-pallet scan times have effectively gone down from 7 minutes using handheld units to under a minute with Visidot, which provides us with absolute accuracy and essentially eliminates all shipping errors. Visidot has literally future-proofed our dispatch operations. We are now confident in our ability to handle any number of shipments within even the shortest of timeframes.” |
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