Meet the Perfect Pallet

This is a logistics solution built around its customers.

Cardinal’s Perfect Pallet Customers

At Cardinal, our mission is to become an enduring partner and strategic extension to our client’s businesses.

With the permanent structural changes to NZ’s supply chain, imperfection is a major distraction: inability to supply on time, quantity errors, damages, rising costs, labour constraints, can impact your bottom line and relationships with retailers while preventing you from executing with consistency and confidence.

Welcome to the Perfect Pallet, Cardinal’s pioneering smart-logistics solution here to revolutionise your supply chain. Innovative, automated, and accurate to give you unprecedented management, accuracy and confidence in your supply chain.

Through smart technology, your Perfect Pallet is expertly built from the ground up. From analysing your inventory and characteristics to ordering, layering and packing with unmatched accuracy, including multiple supplier SKUs on a pallet, aligned to store aisle topography, to enable just-in-time ordering, one-touch goods receipting in store, ease of merchandising and first-time invoice matching.

This is logistics transformed, perfect.

The full scope of the Perfect Pallet project is to receipt, pick, wrap, load, deliver and transfer store-aisle ready multiple supplier sku pallets with 100% accuracy.

Inbound

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) of inbound purchase orders from Customer ERP to Cardinal WMS with SKU, QTY, BBD, Batch are placed. Reverse confirmation of stock received by EDI also available.

Eliminates data entry and ensures Customer and CLL systems are aligned at critical data share points.

Live

Receipt completed systematically per pallet (rather than in bulk). As soon as pallet is quality checked and confirmed, it is labelled immediately (devanners apply a small label to each pallet to identify which PO it belongs to) and the Quality Controller, will cross check all pallets, apply label and scan to validate the carton on the pallet matches the SKU details on label.

Reduces inbound labelling errors and therefore issues regarding outbound full pallets being the wrong SKU.

Live

New stock (NPD) weight, height and cubic measurements are accurately taken by a “Cube’n’Weigh” machine and details updated into WMS for accurate master data.

Live

Putaway

Inventory

Warehouse Outbound

Transport Outbound

How did we test the Pick by Weight Technology?

Master Data Full Review

Testing showed a large number of weight dimension variances between customer master data and SKU actual weights, potentially due to packaging changes or historic data.

In addition, there were variations in weights for individual SKUs. We have reweighed various batches and cartons of each SKU (some in excess of a hundred) to create a tolerance level of the weight validation based on the average weight across the numerous cartons of the same SKU, to ensure the validation of weight accuracy within the software algorithms.

Pick Path Review

Ensuring that the pick path is set up to pick heaviest to lightest, full layers first.

This functionality was already in place but with the update in master data, this has now been reviewed and changes made.

Live Trials

Assigning one or more machines to account to find the exceptions and issues.

The more data and orders going through the machines ensured all errors (SKU tolerance levels) have been found and rectified – such as SKUs with reoccurring weight variances, resulting in a SKU specific tolerance or a split pick (i.e. in layers if large quantity ordered), to ensure validation is accurate.

Team Training

A specialist team has been mobilised to assist each shed move onto this technology including training picking teams and setting up the escalation error alerts to go to inventory team for investigation.