Packaged goods company improves fulfillment
Using a warehouse accelerator, the company decreased workforce planning considerably.
Due to its poorly coordinated warehouse environment, a large, global consumer packaged goods company had a difficult time meeting on-time, in-full (OTIF) fulfillment.
The company operates seven satellite warehouses for storing products, and across its campus, 250 outbound full truckloads were shipping per day. Of these, 85% were drop and hook, and another 15% were live load.
Warehouse and campus activity scheduling required a high level of manual effort. Based on who was on shift and the need of the day, the planning process had many variabilities. Beyond that, volatility, regarding the production schedule and volume, increased planning complexity. These factors often resulted in imperfect schedules, requiring many bring-backs from the satellite warehouses to the plant to complete shipments.
To solve problems of poor OTIF, dock schedule conflicts, inventory shortages and inefficient workforce allocation, the packaged goods company implemented warehouse accelerator software that sits on top of its warehouse management system (WMS) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to build inventory and capacity-constrained schedules.
The company also wanted to understand the delivery expectations of all warehouses over the next 6 to 72 hours. To quickly identify future issues, causes and potential resolutions, the company used the warehouse accelerator tool, which uses algorithms to identify constraints in inventory, capacity and shipping.
The results created opportunities to ship straight from the production line, as 40% to 80% of shipments come directly from the plant, reducing inventory touches. It has also decreased bring-backs of inventory from 16% to 8.7%.
The warehouse accelerator acquires a bird’s-eye view of the operation so the company knows exactly where inventory is located, along with which stock is being delivered. Rather than receiving merchandise from one of the satellite warehouses, the company reduced shuttle moves by 50% and scheduled more crossdocks—from less than 2% to 5%.
The company implemented dynamic scheduling to ensure labor is available when inbound or outbound shipments arrive. Workforce planning declined from 8 hours to 20 minutes, while warehouse transactions were reduced by 33%.
The warehouse accelerator provides flexible, on-demand activity rebalancing, which adapts and rebalances activities, based on what occurs inside of a warehouse; dynamic dock scheduling, which sorts out all activity to ensure all orders are brought in and out of the facility on time and in full; adaptable workforce and labor management that observes staff capacity at each facility and manages it; and scalability to any facility size, while working at sites that are as small as four doors, along with a large number of warehouses.
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