Marshalling gets voice
John Lewis has extended its use of voice to its distribution centre loading and marshalling areas, with the implementation of Voiteq’s VoiceMan Screen-to-Voice solution.
VoiceMan Screen-to-Voice enabled Voiteq to seamlessly integrate with John Lewis’ existing JDA warehouse management system and to rapidly voice-enable the existing loading screens.
A unique application, VoiceMan Screen-to-Voice takes the text prompts displayed on the screen, translates these into voice and then enters the user’s spoken responses back into the screen. This enables employees working within the loading environment to be completely hands-free, allowing a more natural approach to their task.
William Armitage, development manager at John Lewis commented: “Our Partners in loading and marshalling are at the coalface of the business and there is a strong need for them to maintain accuracy when loading. Errors in delivery of goods to stores that have technically not been shipped, and therefore are un-receivable have been a reasonably frequent occurrence – we can only put that down to the process of having to hold devices for scanning, or interacting with screens and keyboards.
"We wanted a solution that offered our Partners the same productivity, increased accuracy and hands-free, eyes-free benefits of the voice-directed system we already successfully use for picking.”