Kookaburra Transforms The Kitting Process To Deliver Excellent Customer Service

Kookaburra Educational Resources, one of Australia’s largest wholesale education suppliers, primarily provides office and stationery supplies to schools as well as government offices across the country. Founded by a teacher in 1989, Kookaburra is an entirely Australian-owned and operated family business based in New South Wales, handling everything from customer orders to distribution. In addition to office and stationery, Kookaburra provides arts and crafts, learning aids, robotics and STEM, sports, and interactive solutions to its customers. One of the primary services Kookaburra provides is building unique custom kits and supply packs for students, with items picked by individual schools, parents, and students.

Kookaburra worked closely with OPEX^® integrator partner, Dexion^® Liverpool, to find a better solution for its order fulfillment process and implemented the OPEX Sure Sort^® automated sorting system in October 2020. It took approximately 3 months from the date of purchase for the Sure Sort system to be fully-installed, allowing Kookaburra to get up and running quickly. Implementing the Sure Sort system allowed Kookaburra to reduce its reliance on labour, requiring only 21 of the original 60 employees that worked during the day-shift, a 65% reduction in labour. They also were able to eliminate their night shift. Automating their sorting process increased Kookaburra’s output per day, while achieving sorting rates of 2,400 items per hour. Deploying the Sure Sort also resulted in Kookaburra picking significantly larger batches of orders, enhancing their picking efficiencies which resulted in an overall reduction of 470% cost per order. When paired with software solutions from Dexion Liverpool, the Sure Sort system allowed Kookaburra to blind-sort their small items without barcodes, improving the flow of their pick cycle in the distribution center. Innoware, Dexion Liverpool’s preferred Warehouse Control System (WCS), ensures efficient product flow across the Sure Sort, conveyor system, label applicators, and check weigh system deployed at Kookaburra.

Now that the solution from OPEX and Dexion Liverpool is in place, Kookaburra is able to grow its business and improve both its upstream and downstream processes without the constraint of time-consuming, manual processes. With the success of the Sure Sort system in their wholesale business, Kookaburra is looking to expand into other opportunities within its DC.