Autumn Ocean Conveyor - Oakland Manufacturing Facility Omnichannel Fulfillment Automation

Project Overview

Autumn Ocean Conveyor's manufacturing facility in Oakland, Illinois operated around the clock with outdated manual systems for parts putaway and picking, leading to significant accuracy issues and inventory challenges. The facility faced the complex task of fulfilling both internal work orders for assembly and online parts orders from the company's e-commerce site—all from a shared inventory pool that only updated at the end of each shift.

The manual processes for receiving and putting away fabricated and purchased parts were cumbersome and time-consuming, while the lack of automation and real-time reporting resulted in frequent data entry errors and picking mistakes. Additionally, training new and seasonal employees required excessive time due to the complexity of the manual workflows. The core business needs centered on simplifying processes, automating shipping and receiving, enabling real-time inventory management, improving data entry accuracy, boosting picking efficiencies, and reducing employee training time to support effective omnichannel fulfillment.

To address these challenges, Autumn Ocean Conveyor partnered with Wind Right to implement a turnkey automation solution tailored to their manufacturing and order fulfillment requirements.

Technical Solution

Voice-Directed Technology

The solution features voice-directed technology that guides operators through receiving, putaway, and picking processes with verbal instructions and validation prompts. Operators receive real-time direction for tasks such as part location verification ("z 1-0 1702 correct"), quantity confirmation ("quantity six"), and SKU identification, eliminating the need for manual paperwork or screen-based data entry. The voice system provides intuitive, step-by-step guidance that reduces cognitive load and minimizes errors.

Key Features

The turnkey integration of voice-directed technology, barcode scanning, and Wind Soft software creates a cohesive digital workflow that eliminates manual processes. This unified system ensures consistent data capture across receiving, putaway, and picking, with seamless communication to the ERP system for end-to-end visibility.

Real-time inventory updates represent a transformative feature, replacing the previous end-of-shift synchronization with continuous data refresh. This capability ensures that inventory levels are always accurate for both internal assembly planning and e-commerce order fulfillment, preventing stockouts or overcommitting inventory.

The streamlining of the picking process from 11 steps to just 6 steps reduces cycle time and operator fatigue. By eliminating redundant manual tasks and focusing on value-adding activities, the system significantly boosts productivity without increasing workload intensity.

The like-parts feature is a key efficiency driver for putaway operations, as it automatically identifies existing storage locations for identical SKUs. This guidance eliminates the need for operators to manually look up part locations, reducing decision-making time and ensuring consistent storage practices.

The system's ability to handle both in-house assembly parts and online e-commerce orders from a single inventory pool supports true omnichannel fulfillment. This flexibility allows the facility to meet dual operational demands without compromising on accuracy or efficiency.

Seamless ERP integration ensures that inventory data flows bidirectionally between the Wind Soft system and the company's core business software. This integration eliminates data silos and reduces the need for manual data reconciliation, improving overall operational visibility.

Results & Benefits

The implementation delivered measurable productivity gains, including a 50% increase in average picks per person. This improvement stems from the streamlined 6-step picking process, real-time guidance, and elimination of manual data entry, allowing operators to complete more tasks in less time.

Putaway efficiency also saw significant improvement, with a 39% increase in average putaways per person attributed to the like-parts feature and digital workflow. Operators no longer waste time searching for appropriate storage locations, as the system provides immediate guidance to existing SKU locations.

Picking accuracy improved by 10% due to the barcode scanning and voice validation features, which eliminate manual data entry errors and ensure correct part identification. This accuracy boost has a downstream impact on assembly line productivity and shipping reliability, reducing rework and customer returns.

Employee training time was nearly cut in half, addressing the critical challenge of onboarding new and seasonal staff efficiently. The intuitive voice-guided workflows and simplified processes reduce the learning curve, allowing new employees to become productive more quickly.

Virtually all data entry errors were eliminated by converting manual processes to digital capture via barcode scanners and voice technology. This reduction in errors has minimized inventory discrepancies, improved order fulfillment reliability, and reduced the time spent on error correction and reconciliation.

Overall, the Wind Soft system has enabled Autumn Ocean Conveyor to increase operational productivity while decreasing costs associated with errors, training, and inefficient processes. The success of the initial implementation has led to plans to extend the system to handle shipping operations within the next year.

Challenges & Solutions

The facility's primary challenge was outdated manual putaway and picking processes that led to accuracy issues, inventory discrepancies, and inefficiencies. Wind Right addressed this by implementing a turnkey solution combining voice-directed technology, barcode scanners, and the Wind Soft software suite, converting manual workflows to digital processes that minimize human error and streamline operations.

A critical pain point was the lack of real-time inventory updates—with data only synced at the end of each shift—creating visibility issues for the shared omnichannel inventory. The Wind Soft software suite solved this by enabling continuous real-time inventory synchronization with the ERP system, ensuring accurate stock levels are available for both internal assembly and e-commerce orders at all times.

Excessive training time for new and seasonal employees was another major challenge, driven by the complexity of manual processes. The streamlined digital workflows, intuitive voice guidance, and reduced process steps (from 11 to 6 for picking) simplified training requirements, cutting onboarding time nearly in half.

Inefficient putaway processes were compounded by the lack of guidance on existing storage locations for identical SKUs. The Wind Soft system's like-parts feature resolved this by automatically identifying where matching SKUs are stored, eliminating manual lookup time and improving storage consistency—directly contributing to the 39% increase in putaway efficiency.

System Integrator

Wind Right served as the system integrator and solution provider for the project, delivering a turnkey automation package tailored to Autumn Ocean Conveyor's omnichannel fulfillment needs. The company provided three core components: voice-directed technology, barcode scanning hardware, and their proprietary Wind Soft execution software suite.

Wind Right's expertise in integrating these technologies with the facility's existing ERP system was critical to achieving real-time data synchronization and seamless workflow integration. The company's solution was designed to address the specific challenges of dual-channel fulfillment (internal assembly and e-commerce) from a shared inventory, with features like like-parts guidance and streamlined process steps.

The Wind Soft software suite, developed in-house by Wind Right, was the backbone of the solution, providing the WES functionality needed to orchestrate receiving, putaway, and picking operations while maintaining real-time inventory visibility. Wind Right's implementation approach ensured minimal disruption to the facility's around-the-clock operations, delivering a solution that immediately began generating measurable improvements in productivity, accuracy, and training efficiency.

The success of the project has strengthened the partnership between Autumn Ocean Conveyor and Wind Right, with plans to extend the system to shipping operations in the near future.