DC Dental is one of the fastest growing, full service dental suppliers in North America, delivering competitively priced supplies to dental professionals. Using a flexible automation with a pick and pass order fulfillment strategy, DC Dental manages over 20,000 of the most commonly used dental products – from burs to bibs to curing lights - in their Baltimore, MD warehouse. Their success is dependent on getting the correct product from the warehouse to the dentist as quickly as possible while maintaining the best price.

The Solution

Two Vertical Lift Module Kardex Shuttles, four Kardex Horizontal Carousels and carton flow rack are batch picking orders in a pick and pass fulfillment strategy utilizing Kardex Power Pick System inventory management software.

The integrated solution utilizes a pick and pass fulfillment strategy with a 20 position batch cart that moves between three zones (zone one - two Kardex Shuttles, zone two – four Kardex Horizontal Carousels and zone three - carton flow rack), all managed by the Kardex Power Pick System. Since the implementation, the automated zone, DC Dental has handled a 54% volume increase with 67% less labor and 73% floor space savings.

The warehouse picks an average 2,500 lines per day to fill roughly 480 orders using 4 order pickers (vs 12 order pickers previously required). The system can handle up to 3,500 lines per hour providing a fast-growing company like DC Dental the ability to quickly scale operations. “We could double in size and only need to add about 3 additional people in our warehouse,” said Friedman.

Using Space Savings as Justification
Using automated storage and retrieval systems, roughly 13,000 square feet of shelving was consolidated into 3,500 square feet, a 73% space savings. This recovered floor space allowed DC Dental to reduce the overall footprint of the facility from 30,000 square feet to 20,000 square feet. They resigned their lease, saving nearly $1 million dollars in rent and utilities over the next 10 years. Combining this savings with the 67% labor savings, ROI justification for this project was easy.

	2 Kardex Shuttles Height: 21 feet
	4 Kardex Horizontal Carousels Length: 56 feet
	Kardex Power Pick System