Our solution
Lupton & Place need to know exactly what they have in their warehouse and where each item is. We’ve built them a warehouse stock management system that uses barcodes to track every item that enters the warehouse from outside suppliers through to finished items ready for despatch.
Cast parts are held in the warehouse before being despatched or going to their next destination (on or off-site). Parts are stored and moved around in stillages, cages on wheels, which can be pushed by hand or picked up by a forklift truck. A barcode will already be present on stillages of parts, as a result of a previous project to track items around the site. They are scanned into the warehouse using the same barcodes, making the booking process quick and efficient. The system maintains a record of stillage movements, including stillage contents, operations completed, who worked on it, and where it is currently located.
When items arrive from external suppliers, the warehouse manager will pick a reusable label from a pile near the warehouse door, attach it to the item, and scan it. The item's details are entered and a suitable warehouse bay is selected. There is an additional process in place for booking in large quantities of the same item, such as bales of raw metal ingots. Rather than booking each item individually, details need only be entered once, making large deliveries easy to manage. This is a big time saver – something you wouldn’t get with an off the shelf system.
We deliberately designed the barcode stock management system to be sustainable – reusable barcode labels mean there is no waste paper or plastic produced in the process. The system is also practical in a real-world way: the reusable labels are heatproof and sturdy, clipping easily to the side of the stillage and surviving the extreme heat near the furnaces.
These benefits are there because we don’t just think about the software, we don’t even just think about the software and the process, we think about the real-life practical aspects of the process too.
