Warehouse Bridge Hardware
Pick-to-Light (PTL)
An industrial-grade pick light at every pick face. When an order drops into your WMS, the lights for that order's items illuminate one at a time. Banner builds the lights. We build the bridge.
An industrial-grade pick light sits at every pick face. When an order drops into your WMS, the lights for that order's items illuminate one at a time. The picker walks the lit route. They press the button at each location to confirm. The light goes out. The next one comes on. No paper, no RF gun screen to squint at, no SKU to memorise.
The 3PLs who get the most out of PTL are running between 800 and 8,000 picks per day with multiple casual or temporary pickers and an accuracy ceiling they can't seem to break through. If you're at 97% accuracy and customers are starting to ask, PTL is what closes that last two points. New pickers go from "needs three weeks of shadowing" to "productive on day one." That training-time win is what most operators tell us is the real ROI — not the speed.
The system
Three layers. One operator-visible result.
Three layers, one operator-visible result. At the top is your WMS — Camelot today, plus other WMS on request. The pick comes from there. The WMS posts the order to the Warehouse Bridge controller. The controller is a compact pre-configured appliance that mounts on a rack in your network closet. It talks to your WMS, talks to the Banner gateway in the aisle, and carries the WMS adapter that turns a pick task into a light command.
In the middle is the Banner gateway. One per zone is typical. It sits on the aisle, hardened to IP67, on industrial 24V power. The Warehouse Bridge controller drives it over industrial-grade daisy-chain cabling. The gateway carries no business logic — it's the protocol translator between our controller and the pick lights, and that's why we picked Banner. Their firmware has been running on auto-OEM lines and pharma packaging floors for years.
Industrial-grade pick lights at the pick face. Daisy-chained on industrial cabling. They cable up to the Banner gateway. When the operator presses confirm, the press flows back up: light to gateway, gateway to the Warehouse Bridge controller, controller to your WMS. That's the whole loop, in well under half a second. The integration layer — the WMS adapter, the operator UX, the exception handling — is where our IP lives. Banner builds the lights. We build the bridge.
What you get
Ships in one consolidated order.
- One Warehouse Bridge controller — pre-configured, plug-and-play, ships ready to point at your WMS endpoint
- N Banner gateways — one per zone is typical, each one drives the pick lights in that zone
- N Banner pick lights — one per pick face, daisy-chained to the nearest gateway
- The WMS integration — Camelot direct today; other WMS via CSV/API on request, with native integrations on the roadmap
- On-site install support — we walk the first zone with your team, then your maintenance lead does the rest
Why this combo
Banner builds the lights. We build the bridge.
Banner builds the lights. We build the bridge. That's the honest division of labour.
Banner Engineering has been shipping industrial sensors and indicators since 1966. Their pick-to-light family is deployed on automotive assembly lines, pharma packaging floors, kitting stations, and warehouse fulfilment lanes. IP67. 24/7 duty cycle. Replaceable modules. When a light fails on a Friday night, the replacement part is one purchase order away — not a phone call to a startup whose hardware roadmap nobody outside the building can see.
What we own is the layer above the gateway: the WMS adapter, the operator UX, the exception handling, the event stream that flows back up to your visibility stack. That's where the actual operator experience lives. We picked Banner because they've solved the hardware problem better than we could in a decade — and we wanted to spend our decade solving the integration problem instead.
The boundary is clean. You don't want to be on a small vendor's hardware roadmap; you want Banner's. And you don't want to live inside Banner's software opinions either; you want ours, because ours talk to your WMS and theirs don't.
Install & commissioning
A day per zone. No engineering firm in the middle.
A single PTL zone installs in under a day with two people from your maintenance team. The order looks like this:
- Controller goes on a rack. The Warehouse Bridge controller mounts on a 1U shelf in your network closet or MDF. One Ethernet cable to your switch. One power cable to your rack. That's the controller install.
- The gateway mounts at the head of the zone. The Banner gateway sits in the aisle — on a column, a rack upright, or a wall plate — on 24V DC power. One Ethernet cable back to the controller. IP67, so dust and water are not a concern.
- Pick lights daisy-chain down the aisle. Industrial cable from the gateway to the first light. Light to light from there.
- The controller is pointed at your WMS. You give us your Camelot endpoint and credentials. The controller authenticates, registers, and pulls the pick map. The gateway is auto-discovered. Each light is auto-addressed.
- Commissioning runs itself. Press the button on light-01, the controller binds it to the first pick location in your slotting file. Walk the aisle. Done. Software commissioning runs in under an hour per zone, on top of the hardware mount above.
If you can hang a shelf and crimp an Ethernet cable, you can install this. No engineering firm on your floor.
Key specs
What you’ll get on day one.
| Component | Spec |
|---|---|
| The controller | Pre-configured appliance · plug-and-play · mounts in your rack · 1U rack mount |
| The gateway | Banner-built · industrial-grade · IP67 · 24V DC industrial |
| The lights | Banner-built · industrial-grade · multi-colour indication · IP67 · industrial daisy-chain cabling |
| Picking throughput | 30–50% faster vs paper/RF |
| Accuracy | 99.9% (vs 97–98% manual) |
| Training time | New picker productive in hours, not weeks |
| Latency | Sub-500ms from WMS pick to lit light |
| Install | Under a day per zone for a competent maintenance lead |
| WMS support | Camelot direct today · other WMS via CSV/API on request, with native integrations on the roadmap |
| Pricing | Quoted per zone — send floor plan |
FAQ
The questions operators ask first.
What does a PTL install cost? Quoted per project — aisle count, pick-face density, and WMS shape it. As a benchmark for scale: a comparable 50-face zone from a traditional integrator typically quotes $40–80k upfront with a 10–15%/year maintenance contract on top. We come in materially below that, with hardware that ships in days and you install yourself. Send your floor plan and we'll quote against it.
How long from order to live? First zone live in two to six weeks. Banner stocks its hardware at industrial distributors — DigiKey, Newark, Radwell — so the kit ships in days, not the six-to-twelve-month custom-build lead times traditional integrators quote. We ship the kit pre-configured. Integration testing is a week against Camelot, longer if your WMS is on our CSV bridge today. Subsequent zones light up in a day each.
Can I retrofit this into a live operation, or does it need a greenfield? Retrofit. The gateway mounts on whatever you've got — existing rack upright, column, wall plate. The pick lights daisy-chain on cable that runs on top of your existing aisle structure. We typically retrofit a zone in a single weekend without disrupting picks.
Which WMSes do you support? Camelot is the shipping integration today — native, real-time, full pick-and-confirm round-trip. Other WMS platforms run on a CSV bridge today, with native integrations on the roadmap. If your WMS isn't Camelot, ask — the adapter pattern is the same and we add new ones regularly.
What if a light fails? Replacement lights are stocked at industrial distributors — DigiKey, Newark, Radwell — you order direct. Unscrew the failed unit, screw in the new one, the controller auto-addresses it. No re-commission, no software ticket.
Do we need a network engineer? No. The controller wants one Ethernet drop and one outbound HTTPS connection to your WMS. The gateways sit on a separate VLAN we'll specify when we ship the controller. If your IT lead can stand up a single VLAN with DHCP, that's the network work.
What happens if our internet drops? The controller caches the active picks locally. The lights keep lighting; operators keep confirming. When the network returns, the event stream catches up. Sub-500ms picks during the outage, no operator-visible disruption.
Pairs with
Software-integrated, not standalone.
The Warehouse Bridge visibility stack — every confirmed pick is an event in the operator dashboard. Pair with Warehouse Heatmap to make sure the items you're lighting up are actually slotted in the right places, and Client Scorecard so the pick accuracy you're paying for shows up in the client portal.
Talk to us about your warehouse.
Send us a few photos of your floor, your pick volumes, and what your WMS is. We’ll tell you which of these — if any — actually makes sense for you. No deck, no quote until we agree there’s a fit.