Good Luck Is a Residue of Preparation - Jack Youngblood

As we celebrate the annual St Patrick’s Day festivities, it’s a good time to talk about luck. Good luck is indeed the residue of preparation.  Distributors and manufacturers alike must continuously prepare themselves for changing tastes and expectations of faster delivery and cheaper products.  No longer do our customers need to ask themselves if they’re getting a good deal because our phones now serve as a bar code scanner that can provide multiple prices and delivery options for the exact same item.  In our world, customers know the rules of thumb for cost per linear feet of conveyor by type and cost per pallet position. 

So how do we prepare ourselves so good luck may follow? 

·         Do you know the dimensions and weights of your SKUs so you may do an automatic comparison of the actual weight to of an order to the expected weight of the order?

o   Reduces overages

o   Reduces returns

o   Reduces omissions

o   Reduces unit of issue problems

o   Most importantly, it improves your customer experience

·         When you walk through your Plant or Distribution Center, are you using rack for pallets, individual cases individual SKU’s and everything in between?

o   Are there big pockets of space where there is no product?

o   Are SKUs mixed in with each other so it’s cumbersome to pick, put away and cycle count?

o   Do you have a lot of cubic space available but you are not sure how to take advantage of it? 

·         Do your smaller SKUs fall between the openings in wire decks? Is there a lot of product on the floor?

·         Are you using standard cases for all shipments, paying unnecessary shipping costs for air?

·         Are you using one shipper for all your outbound orders or do you rate shop for the best deal?

·         Are you applying shipping labels manually? 

·         Do you have record of products shipping from your facility in case of customer complaints of missing orders?

o   Pictures, date time stamp, bar code scan?

o   Are you dealing with inbound cases and bags with no bar codes on them? 

If these questions sound familiar, let’s prepare together so we can make our own luck. 

 

For more information from Greg, view his page at www.trifactor.com/greg

 

 

Taking Care of Business

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.  Benjamin Franklin

We all want the equipment and systems we purchase to last for a long time.  It’s only fair right?  We spend months and sometimes years planning, coordinating and executing the purchase of material handling systems to make our business more efficient, increase our throughput while making our labor resources maximized.  But there are economic and procedural forces out there working against the long term health of your systems.

Economically, the pressure to deliver on profit and revenue growth expectations is great.  Shareholders expect you to hit your revenue and profit targets.  Operation Managers want to be successful and keep costs down.  However, the repercussions of our ambition to deliver good results oftentimes is the decision to eliminate or postpone investment in spare parts or planned maintenance. 

Spare parts are essential to keep your system running consistently.  We must identify the essential parts required to keep our systems running.  Specific parts should be on hand because they are a high wear item and others should be on hand because the lead time to get it replaced would be operationally prohibitive.   Nothing can be built to last forever so it makes sense to develop the inventory of parts to replace when necessary.  Use your system provider for help in determining what parts should be on hand. 

Procedurally, most companies have established planned maintenance checks and services for the various equipment in their facilities.  However, sometimes these checks and services are ignored or not completed properly.   Every piece of equipment in your facility should have its own set of operator and maintenance manuals.  Often they are kept centrally in the maintenance office for reference, providing maintenance tasks and frequency requirements.  The checks and services in these manuals should be incorporated into the master maintenance plan and schedule.    The development and implementation of a proactive maintenance plan will catch issues when they are small, keeping catastrophic equipment failures from happening. 

There are some cases where a company transitions from a very manual, labor intensive process to a more automated approach to their operation.  Of course there are operational cultural changes that present their own challenges.  Training, developing standard operating procedures, and keeping the equipment running can be tough when there is no established maintenance team.  In this case, use your system provider to help you transition.  They have the experience to help you select the right spare parts, the proper operation and maintenance manuals and examination and troubleshooting skills.   Contact for maintenance assistance until you develop a team of your own. 

As Ben Franklin says, “An ounce of prevention” (spare parts and maintenance) “is worth a pound of cure”

For more information from Greg, view his page at www.trifactor.com/greg

The Importance of Being Important

“If some people are so hungry for a feeling of importance that they actually go insane to get it, imagine what miracle you and I can achieve by giving people honest appreciation this side of insanity.” 
― Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People

A couple of years after I joined TriFactor, we were given copies of the famous book “How to Win Friends and Influence People”, written by Dale Carnegie.  At the time, I had known who Dale Carnegie was and the famous book he wrote but I had never read it.  So dutifully I read it and it made absolute sense to me, making the complexity of interpersonal relationships simpler to grasp and digest.  I enjoyed it so much I first gave it to my two older sons and asked them to read it and then paid my two younger sons to read it.  You know how that goes, but in the end I was able to make sure they all read it. 

The book is full of wonderful lessons and historical examples of their honest and effective use.  I am gravitated to the chapter of the book that begins with the statement “He who can do this has the whole world with him.  He who cannot walks a lonely way”   It speaks to me and the book continues with “So the only way on earth to influence other people is to talk about what they want and show them how to get it” How true it is in our everyday lives when we meet customers and get so excited to talk about our competence and our list of accomplishments which are important to us and important in general when really it is our customers that should be doing the talking. 

We should strive for our customers to do the talking.  How else will we know what is important to them?  In a distribution environment, there are many variables and definitions of success which are unique to the customer and unique to the main person responsible for the project.  You may deal with the owner who is interested in reducing labor, increase efficiency or stay in his facility longer to avoid the expense of moving to a bigger facility.  You may be dealing with a Distribution Manager who wants to improve customer service, improve the performance on company operational metrics and prove his/her worth to the company.  No matter what it is that our customers want, we can’t give it to them if we don’t make it our first priority to find out what it is. 

Difficult as it may be, sometimes we must suspend what we want in order to influence our customers to walk our way. 

For more information from Greg, view his page at www.trifactor.com/greg

Honesty

In the long run, I believe that honesty is definitely the best policy. One can get away by being dishonest for a short term, but ultimately, honesty is what pays.

Kapil Dev

It is human nature to want to present the most rosy of pictures when we have a problem.  However tough it may feel or seem, honesty serves our customers best.

In the material handling world we have many facets of a project to consider as we design a new system:

• Manufacturer’s lead times.
• Installation estimates to include environmental or odd hour requirements.  
• Equipment performance to specifications required for speed and accuracy.  
• Software systems compatibility and communications.  
• Mechanical, electrical and software scope changes. 

Earning the trust of our customers is always the ultimate goal.  While most projects are accompanied with their set of challenges, it is always in the customer’s best interest to understand what the challenges are without a layer of sugarcoating on it.  Timely, honest reporting of a concern and the plan to address the concern will ultimately maintain customer trust even though it may be temporarily tense.   

Most project issues may be overcome though engineering to include technology modifications.   However, putting your main customer contact in a bind by not providing timely warning of any issues is difficult to overcome.  An honest firsthand report on the status of the project will allow the customer to plan for any operational changes in a timely manner if required.  Additionally, if there are any challenges that may affect the schedule, bring a plan B to demonstrate that you are engaged to meet and manage the original expectations. 

The saying is true “Nothing is more important than a customer”.  Speaking honestly before during and after a project will demonstrate the importance we place on our customers.   

 

For more information from Greg, view his page at www.trifactor.com/greg

 

It’s Just Rack

The art of simplicity is a puzzle of complexity. - Douglas Horton

I have heard customers say many times “It’s just rack”.  To be sure, rack is equipment, treated as a commodity that should be cheap in cost and quick to purchase and install.  However, like most things that appear easy but are found to be complex after further inspection, rack can become troublesome very quickly.

On the surface, rack is simple.  When looking at it rack appears to be merely frames, beams and maybe some wire decks or cross bars.  However, it requires further assessment. 

Our storage rack holds a myriad of products and they vary from full pallets of all types to individual item storage.  As the loads we store can be of significant weight, we must have a safe means of storing the weight while using as much of available cubic space as possible “Safely”. 

If you access YouTube, you can find videos of rack accidents where the beams and frames were overloaded beyond rated capacity, under-protected from damage and misapplied. 

So let’s look out for several things when planning our rack system so we can be efficient while being safe. 

·         What kind of load do you expect to hold and is it palletized or individual items?  What is the anticipated weight per rack beam level?

·         How many beam levels will be in a bay? Are there different weights anticipated for each level of the bay or is it standard?  What are the beam level dimensions? It matters to the overall capacity of the frame.

·         Are your pallets of consistent quality?  If not, perhaps wire decks or decking is required.

·         Be honest with your employee assessment.  Are they rough with the equipment when handling pallets?  Have you experienced damage in the past?  Should we make provisions to protect the frames columns and end of aisles?

·         Will the equipment be in a cold room or freezer?

·         Are you in a zip code with seismic ratings that may require larger footplates or aisle ties?

·         Do you anticipate the need for sprinkler coverage?

·         Are hazardous material barriers required?

·         What type of forklift do you use and what is the maximum height it can reach to store and retrieve pallets? (Companies have bought rack only to find out their forklifts could not reach the top level of the rack)

·         What is the turning radius of your forklift?  Aisle sizes matters.

·         What kind of product density do we need?  Many SKUs or a few SKUs with high volume. 

Some companies buy used rack.  As such, do you know the frame and beam capacities of what you are buying?  Do you know where it’s been and subjected to in the form of loads and abuse?

In the end, rack is a commodity.  However, it must be designed in advance with plenty of detail about what you plan to store and how you plan to keep your associates safe and equipment damage free.   

For more information from Greg, view his page at www.trifactor.com/greg

 

 

Picky Picky Picky

Most distribution centers and many manufacturing facilities pick products in one form or another. Pallets, cases, parts and kits are routinely picked using a variety of methods.  Paper based, RF enabled, pick to light, pick to voice, horizontal carousels, vertical lift modules, mini-loads, unit load AS/RS and shuttle systems are frequently used to automate traditionally labor intensive tasks.  From absolutely inefficient to unbelievably efficient, you will find them all in industry catalogs, trade shows, YouTube videos and people like me touting what they can do for your operation and customer service. 

It’s tough being a logistics leader at times.  There is so much technology out there and you want your team to be as efficient as possible.  You know that technology can be a modest investment or a  tremendous investment. Don’t forget that when you ask for money to buy new equipment, somebody is tracking the results of the investment.   Often the decisions to address picking efficiencies are cultural, technical, and financial in nature. 

Culturally, we need to understand the nature of our associates.  If you have a low tech, paper driven operation, consideration must be given to the skill sets present.  A leap to a high tech picking system without the pre-training and hiring of capable people will doom the project to fail.  Additionally, the team responsible for picking should be a part of the initial discussions on transitioning from a low tech to a higher tech picking process.  If the pickers have confidence in how it is supposed to work, it will have a better chance of successful implementation.  Sometimes, we have a tenured group of associates who have all the tribal knowledge and tricks to make the most out of what equipment they have.  However, can we count on having a tenured group forever?  Does it make sense to have a repeatable process that is easily learned for new hires?

Technically, order and SKU data means everything.  Volume history, dimensional analysis, peak and seasonal changes, and order makeup and growth projections are needed to determine how products should be slotted and picked.  Since travelling is often the enemy of efficiency, does goods to you technology make sense?  Do you ship high volume low SKU count or do you ship high volume, high SKU count?  Are your SKUs densely slotted; are they awkward to pick and hold?  Are your SKUs high dollar or easily broken or are they easily stolen or a drug that must be controlled by lot?  There are many things to consider that are crucial to the success of the picking system application. 

Financially, picking systems must pay for themselves in a reasonable amount of time.  I recognize what is reasonable to me may not be reasonable to you.  As such, there needs to be a mutually agreed upon set of financial parameters, based on measurable results such as labor savings, error reduction, footprint reductions, customer service improvements, throughput increases.  Companies are often unique in terms of their acceptable measure of payback.  Additionally, there are guides that detail expected picking gains using a specific technology.  However, we can’t treat all companies the same and must temper our projected gains and not overstate them. 

Picking systems are often the lifeblood of our operation.  Let’s make sure we consider the cultural, technical and financial implications before investing.

For more information from Greg, view his page at www.trifactor.com/greg

 

Traveling

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.  Lao Tzu

Travelling in distribution and manufacturing environments is the enemy of efficiency.  Traveling wastes time, creates workload imbalances and increases the cost of product manufacturing and distribution.  Traveling is deceptive since it sometimes appear to be necessary to get the job done. 

When we talk about traveling in the manufacturing plant or the distribution center, it usually involves manually transporting product from one value added process to another or picking items, walking along a designated pick path.  Since it’s only human to want to communicate with each other, walking past our fellow associates without sharing a how the weekend went or how your fantasy football team did is irresistible.  So what do we do about time wasted socializing?  How do we increase productivity without being the communication police?

While it is difficult to keep our team from excessively discussing the news of the day, it is easy to identify how we can reduce the opportunities for travelling. 

·         Assign pick zones or areas of responsibility so your order pickers have less reason to walk the floor

·         Employ “goods to you” systems such as carousels, mini-load systems, tote or case shuttle systems

·         Employ picking systems such as pick to voice or pick to light that tend to engage the picker, reducing the slack time between picks

·         Convey products from one value added process to another as conveyors don’t speak with each other or at least they don’t verbally

·         Use Human Machine Interface software to graphically depict your automation systems so you may identify jams, malfunctions and safety issues

·         Employ automatic scales, tapers, labeling systems and manifesting to keep personnel congestion to a minimum

Most of our associates are generally hard-working, dedicated and loyal.  We need them to successfully manufacture and distribute the products that allow us to grow and be profitable.  However, we are social beings and we need systems and an environment that reduces distractions, promoting focus on our respective tasks.  Are your associates travelling?

For more information from Greg, view his page at www.trifactor.com/greg