Case Study: Fox Racing Sees Productivity Soar With Voice Technology

The motocross clothing maker needed to get out from under its manual systems.

Channel Partners

November 6, 2012

3 Min Read
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The Client. Fox Racing was founded in 1974 as a clothing maker for motocross, an intense and demanding combination of stunt- and dirt-bike riding. The company is among the world’s most recognizable brands, thanks to the fox head logo sported by motocross participants and fans in real life and on TV sitcoms. Now, in its third decade, Fox Racing has branched out as an apparel provider for surfers, wakeboarders and mountain bikers, too; it’s also big in major department stores. Fox Racing is headquartered in Morgan Hill, Calif., with offices in Irvine, Calif.; Calgary, Alberta, Canada; and Newcastle, U.K.

The Challenge. Fox Racing had reached the point where its technology could not accommodate more growth  the company had added so many new product lines that it was maintaining more than 35,000 product codes. That was a struggle, though, given that Fox had been using paper and labels in its order-picking operation, and RF scanning for putaway and replenishment workflows. The former method hurt productivity and accuracy, and the latter required too many steps, which meant that reliability suffered. For instance, grabbing a size 15 boot with an RF gun in hand was difficult. Employees needed a hands-free option.

The Solution. Fox turned to its technology partner, Vitech Business Group, for help. Vitech asked Fox to identify its priorities. Those were: to keep pace with a highly fluctuating order volume; to improve the ability to plan staffing levels according to order volumes; to reduce the cost of RF equipment replacements; and to cut down on long worker training times and problems incurred by human error. As a result of those needs, Vitech recommended Fox deploy a voice platform that would dictate instructions to workers, and let staff talk back. In such a scenario, warehouse workers wear headsets that give them directions; at the same time, people can talk to the voice recognition system, letting it know when they have finished a task, for example. With this in mind, Fox chose to use Vocollect Voice.

The Result. Fox uses Vocollect Voice for its picking, replenishment, cycle-counting, slotting, receiving (Europe), and soon, packing, operations. In the time since deploying Vocollect Voice, Fox has seen notable changes.

  • Picking productivity improved by 50 percent. Picking is the most labor-intensive and expensive part of distribution, and tends to require the most people. Fox said the time to pick totes and carts with voice took less than an hour compared to paper. 

  • Accuracy increased from 82 percent to 99.9999 percent. Vocollect said the jump comes because, with the two-way dialogue in a voice system, it is almost impossible to under-pick, over-pick or pick the wrong item.

  • Training time went down from one day to 1.5 hours. Full worker productivity also was recorded by day two, Vocollect said.

  • Employee counts were reduced. Fox went from 35 pickers to 18 after deploying voice and cut the number of inventory counters from four to one, saving money.

  • Combining picking with inventory pushed up productivity by 35 percent. Foxs auditors require the company to audit inventory every 90 days. Combining voice-picking with voice-cycle-counting helps increase 30-35 percent of the cycle-counts during each 90-day method. Overall, the goal is to eliminate idle worker time. So, when picking staff are awaiting an order, a 90-day scheduled cycle-count gets triggered. Pickers then are directed to locations that have not been counted in 90 days.

  • ROI achieved in six months. That was six months less than projected but by extending voice past its picking operations, Fox has seen greater paybacks.

I am quite satisfied with the way we have been able to rapidly identify and integrate new ways of using voice across multiple workflows,” said Robby Dhesi, vice president of operations at Fox Racing. “We would be happy with the results we have attained just from using voice with picking, but the value-add we have found in applying voice for many other workflows and the ability to interleave tasks have make our overall performance skyrocket and keep pace with the growing demands of a successful business.”

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