Situation:
- 27 order pickers on 3 shifts riding through the Distribution Center on counter balanced lift trucks and picking approximately 50-55 orders per day.
- Over 430 skus located by product number and some randomly throughout the Distribution Center.
- Travel time was approximately 27% of the Order Pickers time. Customer Orders staged a day ahead, checked later& loaded onto trailers for delivery to the customers.
Critical Issue:
- The cost and time to pull an order and the daily throughput capacity of order fulfillment process s limited the growth for the company in this Distribution Center operation.
Reasons:
- The number of customer orders/day was growing, order quantity was decreasing to more case picks than pallet picks and the time to pick orders was increasing.
Vision:
- The Distribution Center manager wanted to improve productivity significantly, increase the daily throughput capacity so that additional daily customer orders could be handled efficiently and timely for several years.
We Provided:
- The Industrial Engineering services for work sampling the order fulfillment process, identifying and quantifying the improvement opportunities, preparing the capital justification, vendor recommendation, project planning and scheduling.
- We gave the Management team an updated plan on how best to develop a forward pick area along with a slotting plan to reduce pick travel time and increase throughput.
We identified over $325,000 in potential annual labor savings without a major capital investment.
Results:
- The Distribution Center management team was able to increase throughput, reduce headcount and meet the daily customer demands without a major capital investment in material handling or storage equipment
