Barcoding your way to 100% OTIF – on time, in full, every time

In the glass business, Dispatch is a busy place, where mistakes can happen easily, but with significant consequences for your customers, your reputation and your bottom line.

If your dispatch team misses something off a customer’s delivery, it’s likely to cause serious inconvenience. Even if they load something extra onto a customer order, it makes you look disorganised and unprofessional. Some people take advantage of suppliers who aren’t 100% on top of things, using your inefficiency to take the blame for their mistakes – like breakages or under-ordering.

That’s why, if you are serious about service – and profitability – you’ll be aiming to match the industry leaders with 97% OTIF (on time, in full).

Experienced leaders know that you don’t improve quality just by telling people to work harder or more carefully; mistakes are part of human nature. When you need 100% accuracy (or something very close) you need robust systems. For the most successful glass businesses this includes barcode tracking to assemble and check goods in dispatch.

Jotika Load Assist is a leader in the glass business. It gives you total tracking of every item that is made and goes out of your doors. It ensures that your people are loading all the right items and getting every customer order complete.

• In dispatch, operators use a handheld barcode scanner which gives them instant audio and visual confirmation that they have the right items.
  
  
• Every stillage has its own barcode, which is scanned too. If someone puts an item on the wrong stillage there is an immediate alarm tone, with more details on the display.
  
  
• To speed things up and make things easier for loading, each item is also labelled with clear colour coding and distinct symbols for each order.
  
  
• The Jotika Load Assist system matches items off against each order and checks that everything is there that should be.

This alone can eliminate just about all of the issues of missing or incorrectly loaded items. But some organisations choose to go one step further and use Jotika Load Assist to verify every completed load just before it goes out.

• One of our clients uses handheld barcode scanners to double-check every item on every stillage. The system matches the barcodes – on the items and the stillage – against the order details to verify that everything is where it should be, and nothing is missing. Any issues are flagged up immediately with an audible warning and details on the barcode scanner’s screen.
  
  
• Done manually, this would be a time-consuming and error-prone exercise. With Jotika Load Assist, this customer is checking over 2500 items a day, taking two people less than an hour.

Jotika Load Assist is a critical element in achieving the consistent quality of service that customers expect as well as avoiding the cost of rework and additional deliveries.