Lab warehouse's new wireless receiving system is faster, more accurate

First DOE facility to use wireless receiving technology

Mar. 9, 2010—If you think that what goes on at the SM-30 Warehouse, stays at the warehouse, think again. You’d be surprised at how quickly and efficiently goods arriving at the Lab’s central receiving facility are processed these days, thanks to a new wireless receiving system that was launched on March 1. It’s the first system of its kind in the Department of Energy complex.

If you think that what goes on at the Lab's main warehouse, stays at the warehouse, think again. You’d be surprised at how quickly and efficiently goods arriving at the Lab’s central receiving facility are processed these days, thanks to a new wireless receiving system that was launched on March 1. It’s the first system of its kind in the Department of Energy complex.

"The new system is making our receiving process faster and more accurate," said Bob Travis, warehouse operations manager for materials management. And that’s vital, because that big beige building receives all of the equipment and materials purchased by the Lab’s Acquisition Services Division, as well property transferred from other organizations, Travis said.

207K packages per year

So how many FedEx, UPS, yellow freight, and private carrier shipments are we talking about? “"The warehouse accepts and processes an average of 17,250 packages, express envelopes, and other procurements a month," he said. "That’s about 207K packages or 1,795 tons of material per year that are received and processed by a 15-member receiving team." (The mail staff, which processes the more than 29 million pieces of mail delivered annually to the Lab by the U.S. Postal Service, as well as about 700K pieces of outgoing mail, consists of 15 people and is separate from the warehouse receiving staff).

Those 207K packages need to be processed accurately, something that didn’t always happen under the old system. "When goods came in, workers had to place their barcode scanners in a cradle, manually download the receiving file from the Procurement database, scan the received packages, and then replace the scanners in the cradle to upload the file transfer in order to mark the item as received," Travis said.

In addition to the extra time that took, errors began creeping in, so that some payments to vendors were not processed. "LANL began receiving calls from suppliers and the New Mexico small business office representatives regarding past-due payments," said John Tapia of ASM-Property Management (PM).

Wireless is best

Employees in Acquisition Services put their heads together to come up with a solution. The best option was wireless technology, but that required approval from the National Nuclear Security Administration because of the Lab’s security-based moratorium on wireless technology use, Tapia said. Lab personnel developed a Security Enclosure Plan. NNSA approved the plan in January after all classified communications lines were removed from the warehouse and personnel there began training on and testing the wireless technology. On March 1, the new system was launched.

"The new wireless system has greatly reduced the amount of time required to process incoming goods, but—more importantly—it has increased the timeliness and accuracy of LANL's payments to its vendors," Travis said.