The deployment was unusual because of the speed of the wireless rollout, which allows greater efficiency and accuracy than did older methods based on paper systems and wires, said Jason Witty, director of information technology at Southern, which is based in Miami.
The warehouse is 650,000 square feet, about the size of eight football fields, and combines three northern Florida distribution sites into one, Witty said. The centralized facility will save the company about $4 million a year, he said.
Witty wouldn't comment on the cost of the facility or the wireless network and related inventory applications. Major vendors on the project were IBM, Cisco Systems Inc. and Symbol Technologies Inc., he said.
Construction of the building began in early 2005, but deployment of the wireless network began in June 2005 and lasted into January 2006, Witty said.
Witty said he knew upfront that doing a Wi-Fi site survey would be a challenge, because of all the metal in the warehouse building, including racks to hold bottles of liquor, and large metal construction equipment. Metal tends to disrupt wireless signals.
As a result, his team and contractors conducted three site surveys to see if they had Wi-Fi access points installed properly and in the correct sites to handle inventory data transmissions reliably. One of the surveys was conducted when the building was nearly built and the physical layout was known. The second took place after some of the goods had arrived. And the third came after the warehouse was full, Witty said.
Still, Witty said, 'I learned you can never start planning too early. There are a lot of gotchas on a building of this size and scale. You have to make sure you talk through every need.' He said he learned that on future projects he should get the fiber and Ethernet cable contract work started earlier, but he praised the cable contractor, Lexington, Ky.-based Amteck of Kentucky Inc., for its efforts to get the job done quickly.
Site surveys are absolutely critical to get deployments right and for complete WiFi coverage," said Jack Gold, an analyst at J. Gold Associates in Northboro, Mass. "Warehouses can be particularly bad with metal all over. Metal and wireless don't get along real well."
Gold said that designing the wireless system was crucial as well, since 50 workers in one location could probably not be supported by a single access point. And workers relying on voice commands via wireless, as in the case of the new warehouse, need reliable connections, he said.
The innovations in the warehouse that Wi-Fi supports include a voice-based inventory picking system, which is based on software from Lucas Systems Inc. in Sewickley, Pa. The system allows workers who pick bottles for an order from warehouse racks to receive audible commands via a headset over Wi-Fi from "Jennifer," an automated voice attendant that uses optical character recognition technology to interpret written orders. The system helps double-check that the attendant made the correct choice, and a team of workers at a separate location provide another check, Witty said.
'We use voice picking versus looking at a piece of paper, which is not nearly as efficient,' he said.
Another inventory innovation provides four cameras on a main conveyor belt, which scans cases that are loaded onto trucks and stores the video digitally. 'If a case of liquor is missing on a truck, we know it was this item number,' Witty said. 'It helps with order accuracy, and so we ship right and don't have to reship.' That video data is transmitted through cables, not wireless, however.
Symbol 7900 devices are also mounted on forklifts and connected wirelessly to a warehouse management system, which helps to ensure that pallets of cases are stored in the correct location, he said.
In all, there are about 130 wireless endpoints at the facility, including 60 Wi-Fi voice phones, working through 24 access points, Witty said. He estimated the warehouse can process 10,000 cases of liquor per hour.
So far, Southern is not using radio frequency identification technology in its warehouses or elsewhere to track products. 'Southern wine is intrigued by RFID, but suppliers aren't pushing it, nor are our customers,' Witty said. 'People have been talking about RFID for three years, but it's not here yet.'
Southern's new warehouse could handle RFID with a minimal investment simply by swapping out the scanners being used, Witty said. A team at Southern is aware of RFID's capabilities and is weighing all the technology issues, as well as the privacy issues for retail buyers, Witty said. If suppliers push the technology, 'we're ready,' he said. 'But I can't speculate when.'
Witty said he is fortunate to work for a company that's willing to invest in innovative technology, including wireless network. 'I'm lucky management sees the value in technology,' he said. 'Our suppliers feel taken care of and we're taking care of our customers.'