EPG talks up the benefits of Voice in the warehouse
Gavin Clark from EPG Ehrhardt Partner Group is the company’s UK Country Manager and has worked in supply chain for nearly 20 years, mainly in WMS. “I get involved in various aspects of the business, from sales through to delivery and customer support. Working very closely with the customers and UK team means that every day is different, which is just how I like it.”
EPG is one of more than 120 exhibitors at IntraLogisteX this year that is eager to catch up face-to-face with the industry, without any pandemic-related restrictions, to discuss the company’s latest developments. “In a few months, our brand-new major release Lydia 9 will be available. We don’t want to give too much away yet, but it will again bring relevant improvements in terms of overall performance and user-friendliness.”
What Clark can reveal, though, is that the new voice-optimised mobile computer VOXTER Vantage will be unveiled at the intralogistics event of the year. “It’s the perfect match to LYDIA Voice,” he says. “In comparison to its predecessor model, the VOXTER Vantage enables 300% faster voice recognition, is equipped with the optimised enterprise operating system Android Industrial+ and offers considerably improved Wi-Fi performance.”
Seamless interaction between hardware and software is the key to a successful voice solution in a logistics environment. Customers that switch from other voice systems to LYDIA Voice see a 6-18% increase in productivity on average. In VOXTER Vantage, LYDIA Voice customers are now receiving a hardware solution that increases productivity and performance even further, leading to greater overall performance.
“We are also introducing an extension to our Lydia Subscription model,” adds Clark. “With Lydia Subscription, customers can easily rent software and hardware instead of buying. And we are now offering Lydia as SaaS, which means we have added the option of cloud hosting and managed services to our subscription offer – it’s a real all-round ‘no worries’ package.”
Highlighting the benefits of the solutions offered by the company, CONA Services deployed Lydia Voice across +90 Coca-Cola bottler locations in the USA (CONA is the IT services company for the Coca-Cola bottling business in North America). According to CONA, LYDIA Voice has brought productivity gains of up to 7% as well as clear voice recognition, the elimination of voice template training, and a more co-ordinated system architecture compared to the previous voice system.
The use of voice technology brings productivity increases of 30% and more, so that significantly more throughput can be achieved with the same resources. “Our customer UVEX Group, for example, switched from paper-based picking to Lydia Voice,” continues Clark. “Here, not only has the change in technology brought a significant increase in productivity of over 30%, Voice also made it possible to introduce multi-order picking. This alone brought another 6% increase in productivity on top. And the error rate is also almost zero.”