As the first Food Service Distributor in Canada to implement voice directed order fulfillment technology, Summit has taken a giant step toward realizing the foodservice industry’s ultimate goal – the ever-elusive perfect order.
In use at Summit for about a year now, Vocollect Voice™ has sent the already high accuracy rates of orders leaving warehouses soaring.
Voice Of Reason
Donning a speech-recognition headset and wireless belt receiver, Order Selectors speak a three digit verification code into a microphone to initiate a sequence of voice-driven checks and balances that dramatically increases order accuracy.
Voice’s Accuracy Hits A High Note
“We knew this was working when customers started calling to ask what we were doing differently,” says Summit’s Senior Director of Operations, Bob Fowler. “Clients were receiving much more accurate orders and wanted to know what we changed. We had very high accuracy rates previously – about one error in 800 items selected. This technology has taken us to one mistake in 12,000.” Our target is one in 14,000.
When Customers Win, Summit Wins
The introduction of Vocollect Voice™ builds on Summit’s long history of leading the way in customer service by investing in its operations. Whether it was improving delivery efficiency with Roadnet, aggressively pursuing HACCP certification to ensure best in class food safety standards, or improving the order placement process with PowerNet™ and PowerSell,™ Summit has viewed innovation as a key to customer success.
The extremely low error rates made possible by Voice Pick translate into enormous benefits for Summit customers. Accurate orders mean less out of stocks, lower administration and accounting costs and less time spent dealing with inventory issues. This frees customers to focus on serving their patrons and increasing their sales.
“With more than 30 years of working in the foodservice industry I have to say that this Vocollect technology has had the single biggest impact on order accuracy and customer satisfaction that I have ever seen,” says Summit President, Jack Battersby. “But we are not at the perfect order yet. That is our real goal.”
“We are committed to investing in initiatives that will benefit our customers and our suppliers,” says Battersby. “As a result, we focus first and foremost on bettering our infrastructure and logistics over spending money on marketing programs and premiums. It comes down to priorities, and we see significant benefits from improving our operations and product delivery, because this delivers significant value to our customers.”
The Process Goes Like This
A list of items to be selected is generated by the host system, and is transmitted to devices running Voice Pick via a wireless network.
Voice Pick translates the items on the list into speech commands that direct the selector to an aisle/section and slot location. The selector confirms the location by speaking a numeric identifier into their speech-recognition headset.
Voice Pick responds with a quantity of the item to be picked up, (e.g., “Pick three”). When the task is complete, the selector speaks the number of items picked up into the headset (e.g., “three”) to confirm quantity. Selectors may only proceed to the next point in the process when the information spoken into the headset cross-references correctly with the information on the system. |
