St. Louis Facility Creates Jobs With Speech Data Collection Technology From Intermec

For more than 100 years, Lighthouse for the Blind has helped people who are blind or partially sighted overcome the challenges of vision loss. Promoting independence, equality and self-reliance through rehabilitation training and relevant services, the organization’s primary mission is to create jobs for the blind. The Lighthouse’s 25,000 square-foot St. Louis packing facility and its employees fulfill this mission by assembling large medical kits for the U.S. government, shipping hundreds of kits each year.

Although much of the work at the Lighthouse St. Louis facility was being performed by blind employees, many of the assembly tasks critical to the organization’s product could not be accomplished by the blind – they could not pick products, perform materials handling tasks or prepare or move items for the kits.

“This location assembles kits that contain more than 500 line items and can take up fifteen pallets, such as triage station kits, and the majority of our labor force could not participate in the work,” said Lighthouse for the Blind St. Louis IT Manager Mark Adams. “Ninety percent of our employees are legally blind, so we needed a new warehouse management solution that was completely blind friendly.”