Small retailers and third-party logistics companies receive enterprise-quality warehouse execution system with little capital investment

HILLIARD, OH—January 5, 2015—VARGO®’s new COFE® SaaS WES system is now available at a pricing structure that empowers small to medium size retailers and third-party logistics companies to take advantage of innovative continuous order fulfillment technology used by industry leading retailers.

The powerful COFE® (Continuous Order Fulfillment Engine) system is the first warehouse control system that processes orders within a distribution center using pull-based methodologies to achieve the lowest order cycle times, eliminate buffers and enable continuous order picking for waveless fulfillment operations. COFE® also allows greater flexibility for expediting orders through the operation. Because it uses pull-based methodologies, it is easier to manage than other warehouse control systems. On a large scale, for example, a company using the COFE® system can expect to achieve order cycle times in the range of 25-45 minutes. This same process scales from tens of thousands of orders to hundreds of thousands. Traditional wave based warehouse execution systems (WES) typically have order cycle times that range from several hours to several days.

COFE® is a customizable WES that can direct material handling machines as well as people, devices and processes. It synchronizes direct-to-consumer distribution center workers with equipment availability as they pull orders through distribution centers. COFE® can be used to maintain operational flow and to integrate sortation systems, automated storage and retrieval systems, conveyors, additional RF users and additional user licenses, as a company grows.

COFE® SaaS WES is a new pricing model for the popular COFE® technology. The new “software as a service” (SaaS) pricing model allows material handling professionals to pay based on the number of orders processed, reducing the capital investment typically required to implement a warehouse execution system. Through this innovative pricing structure, smaller companies—that process as few as 2,000 orders a day or 44,000 units a week—can now have the same tools, bells and whistles that much larger companies benefit from in their distribution centers. Under the COFE® SaaS model a distribution center will be able to experience the same efficiency-related benefits realized by larger distribution operations and have a core process and technology that will be able to grow into a fully mechanized operation.