The TaylorMade Golf Company was founded in the spring of 1979 by Gary Adams, a golf equipment salesman who remortgaged his home for $24,000 to kick off the business. At first, including him, there were only three employees at the company and a single, but innovative, product: a driver made of stainless steel, instead of wood.

Until recently, the company’s supply chain still relied on manual order picking, which in today’s Amazon-style logistics environment had become a very costly and time-consuming way to run the business. The manual picking operation was also resulting in employees suffering from repetitive strain injury, which in turn was affecting productivity.

TaylorMade had considered using voice recognition to speed-up its processes in the past, but decided not to move forward with the technology, as its initial impression was that it was too expensive and difficult to implement. However, as the years went by, cost pressures began to mount as the team of 20 to 25 pickers averaged only 41 transactions an hour.

In its quest to increase picking productivity, TaylorMade’s operation team visited several warehouses that had already implemented different types of picking systems that they could try out. Many of the products they encountered required significant implementation efforts before delivering actual value, which was not what the company was looking for. It needed results.

With the help of consultants at Resource Supply Chain Solutions, TaylorMade came across Ivanti Speakeasy, a voice recognition solution powered by Wavelink. After a thorough evaluation process, the company decided it was what it was looking for: a solution that was easy to implement and that delivered results after a short period of time.

Because the solution did not require changes to applications or the addition of middleware, there was no need for TaylorMade to overhaul its existing warehouse management system. This made it possible for the process implementation to only last about two weeks. Pickers began using the new system within a few months.

The difference was immediate. Before, the 20 to 25-person team had to squint at small screens, squeeze the triggers on their RF scanners and set down their scanners every time they wanted to pick a product. Voice automation reduced manual data entry and the more ergonomic wearable computer contributed to a lower injury rate among the workers.

Now, workers have wearable mobile computers from Zebra and the voice solution tells them what products to pick, where they are located and what to scan through verbal prompts. The workers confirm their tasks with vocal commands and by reading out codes that represent locations or products throughout the warehouse, keeping their eyes and, more importantly, their hands on the orders they are picking.

Voice recognition has made it possible for TaylorMade to reduce the number of pickers, because each person is now more productive. Eight months after the implementation, the company now has a 14 to 16-person team that averages 184 transactions an hour. Worker accuracy has also increased and the average error rate is now a meagre 1%.

The system is very intuitive, so employees can get to work without much training and even temporary workers can become productive very quickly. Newcomers who do not know the layout of the company's pick line or the warehouse know what do to in under 10 minutes. Another positive is that it can be used by workers with accents or dialects from all over the world.

Despite its earlier hesitation, implementing a voice recognition solution into the warehouse has been hugely advantageous to the company, resulting in increased productivity and accuracy, customer satisfaction and corporate profitability.

By Chris Tozer
Territory Manager UK, Ireland & Italy,
Ivanti.