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

 

 

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

“Waste Not Want Not”

Often we accept the waste in our packaging as the cost of doing business. For companies who are shipping a myriad of products, it’s tough to consistently select the most efficient shipping carton.  As a result:

·         We pay for cartons that are underutilized

·         We fill up the unused space with void fill that is not free

·         We use void fill machines that can be expensive to buy, service and maintain

·         The postage paid on the case is more than what it should be due to extra weight

·         We buy totes then use our associates to dump the contents out and transfer to a case using their intuition

Continuing on this course is an option to be sure.  However, in many packaging and shipping operations, we can improve on this waste by knowing the characteristics of what we are shipping.  The length, width, height and weight of our individual SKUs are crucial information.  Armed with this information, we can calculate the expected volume of a given order.  If we know the anticipated volume, we can select the right shipping container at the beginning of the picking process using carton weight calculations. The benefits include:

·         Potentially reduce the width of the case conveyor through the elimination of totes

·         Reduce or eliminate the void space in our shipping cartons

·         Reduce labor required to audit, transfer and process void fill

·         Reduce corrugated stock costs

·         Identify mis-picks through weight validation

 As we all know, there is continuous pressure on margins and a focus on waste may be the edge you need to reduce your unit costs. 

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

Should I stay or should I go?

Successful distributors often find themselves a victim of their own success.  Your “Once Small” business has now grown into a very large distribution center.  Your work-force that was once a few tried and true set of associates that you knew personally and could rely on for their ability to use their initiative and “tribal knowledge” of your business has grown multiple times.  Perhaps you don’t know them by name anymore as unfortunately they seem to come and go.  Your once spacious warehouse continues to grow laterally and it is getting tough to find space to pick, package and stage product.  So the subject comes up: “Are we getting too big for this facility?” and “Maybe it’s time to move to a bigger place”.   Don’t get me wrong, System Sales Engineers like me love a new distribution center and maybe it is time to move to a bigger place. But before you do, let’s point out a few areas that deserve some consideration. 

Cubic Space vs. Lateral Space

You are spread out to the max but do you have clear areas above your current distribution operation to use vertically instead of laterally.  There are many ways to use this space that often goes ignored.  Shelf supported platforms, mezzanines, pick modules and sorters can often be elevated to use the vertical space available.   Additionally, in distribution operations with small parts or many slower moving SKUs, vertical lift modules are a good means of condensing storage of items while suing the full clear height of your facility. 

Manifesting Consolidation

You ship with the typical providers UPS, FEDEX and USPS and you keep adding manifesting stations to keep up with the throughput requirements.  However, many distribution centers are automating this function in a condensed space with a picking operation that features:

·         Picked case LPN – License Plate Number bar codes that contain order data.

·         Cases that are bar coded by the case manufacturer with dimensional data contained.

·         Central shipping label print and apply lines

o   Case LPN is scanned

o   Case dimensional data code is scanned

o   Case is weighed in line on the fly

o   Shipping label (FEDEX, UPS or USPS) is applied automatically

o   Case is sorted automatically to their respective line by shipping type

Imagine one central shipping area instead of multiple manifesting lines with all the redundant equipment and space that comes with it. 

Picking Consolidation

You have an army of pickers that pick up their paper pick lists, pick orders one at a time with carts, taking them up to a central packing area.  I know it was never meant to be this way but it just came with the great success of your business.    With all this travelling and movement come the inevitable reduction of throughput and the expansion of picking areas required to hold all this traffic, never-mind the social activity that goes together with pushing picking carts around the distribution center. 

Many distribution centers centralize picking, using batch picking with a suitable technology which may include RF scanners, pick to light, or voice picking.  The picking may be done out of carousels (horizontal and vertical) depending on the velocity of the individual SKU or out of pick modules which are slotted by velocity of pallet picks (full pallet, carton flow or shelving).  The right type is a function of the speed of the pick, dimensional qualities of the SKU and the density of product pick faces.

There are also “Goods to You” applications that make great use of the vertical space often available in many warehouses.  These “Goods to You” systems bring the product to the picker and are versatile in form and function. 

Before you consider moving, spend some time looking up and consolidating where you can, using proven technologies.  It’s much cheaper than taking on a new lease.