Jewellery maker Pandora has reported 90% picking productivity improvements at its pan-European distribution centre (DC) since implementing Accellos warehouse management software from BalloonOne. 

The supply chain IT company implemented the warehouse management system (WMS) at Pandora’s state-of-the-art distribution centre in Hamburg, Germany, in just three months. BalloonOne integrated its WMS with Pandora’s Microsoft Dynamics AX enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, which by itself could not keep up with the fast pace and scale of the warehouse operation. 

“We are now into peak season as we fulfil orders for Christmas. We are also launching new products so we need to be as productive as possible. Our primary key performance indicator for productivity is the number of pieces picked an hour. We can see that by comparing year-on-year performance we are seeing picking improvements as high as 90%,” said Kristian Willumsen, Pandora vice president, supply chain development.

“I really appreciate the attitude the BalloonOne team displayed in helping us despite the very short timeline. The quality of design, specification and documentation was excellent. We received the benefits of their experience in helping our DC people develop their ideas about how they could achieve our goals of establishing a world-class leading operation.” 

Together with the new WMS, Pandora has implemented new picking strategies to suit the different types of order, which enable productivity improvement. For example, 80% of orders are fulfilled using ‘pick and pass,’ a technique used when there are a high volume of product lines in each pick. While, for orders of five product lines and less, the company uses a batch picking method. 

Pandora has also taken the opportunity to use the Accellos implementation to automate its invoicing process, which has released several full time staff to work elsewhere in the DC. Pandora designs, manufactures and markets hand-finished, modern jewellery in more than 70 countries on six continents through approximately 10,300 points of sale, including approximately 950 concept stores.