Supply Chain Brain - November/December 2011

provider’s customer. The experience was
“invaluable,” she says. “We were able to see
and talk to the people who helped imple-
ment, use and support [the system].”
Implementation of the software at the
first Midmark location was a relatively
smooth process that spanned just two
months, from March to May of 2011. “It was
in line with expectations,” says Lange.

There was a certain amount of customiza-
tion involved. Lange praises Take project
manager Cristi Blaes for her role as project
manager and business analyst, adjusting the
product to meet the customer’s unique
needs. As Blaes explains it, Midmark wanted
implementation, allowing for small tweaks
in the design where necessary. The team
included logistics managers, network
administrators, end users and project spon-
sors. “There was nothing major,” says Blaes.
“We really didn’t redo it.”
Midmark acquired two products from
Take. The first, Gemini, provides the mobile
data connection. It consists of software that
validates the data while workers are on the
floor using wireless mobile scanners. The
second tool, Connect, is a label-printing
application. The combined system allows a
worker to print out a label from a wireless
unit, then apply it to the selected box at the

to transition to “a more guided process” in the warehouse. The company’s previous pick-confirmation setup had been limited to a list of items to be picked and where they were stored. The new system would match picking order to the warehouse’s actual layout, so that workers weren’t making unnecessary trips from one end of the facility to the other, or wasting lift-truck moves.

Midmark’s internal experts offered feed-
back that helped smooth the process of
time of actual picking. The new process
eliminates a number of time-consuming
manual steps, says Blaes.

A Smooth Interface
The Take technology essentially sits atop
Oracle’s E-Business Suite, providing a
smooth interface to the ERP without the
need for a third-party system, according to
Grant Woolf, Take’s vice president of strat-
egy and business development. “We config-
ure the user interface to let the worker do
the work most efficiently,” he says. The
application typically supplies about 20 per-
cent of the functionality of a traditional
WMS, he adds, yet is designed to cover
about 80 percent of a customer’s volume.