Company and Project Background
A creative branded merchandise agency that helps global brands build culture, awareness and meaningful connections with their customers, employees and communities across 150 countries worldwide, approached SCCG to review their current warehouse operations and systems.
Objectives of the Project
With operating hubs in three different countries, all three warehouses have different operational performance.
Key reasons for differences:
- The deployment of a Warehouse Management System (WMS) in just one.
- Different operational processes across the sites (both physical and pickface layout/sizing)
Challenges in the Project
- Issues with inventory, accuracy and storage efficiency
- Different processes at different locations
Initial Situation and Solutions
- Phase 1– conducted an operational review of two of the sites to identify underlying reasons for differences in performance defining optimal ways of working (including layouts, pickface sizing and “To-Be” KPIs) This phase will also identify the functional requirements for a new WMS.
- Phase 2 – conduct a tender process to select an appropriate WMS for operations in the other two countries including a functional evaluation, IT requirements (service, hosting and integration) and commercial benchmarking.
Outcomes/Conclusions
- Capacity enhancement, SCCG was asked to comment on options to increase the stockholding capacity in one of the locations, including the implementation of VNA. VNA was not recommended as it will incur throughput and congestion challenges. An alternative option was proposed which would be to relocate the repack area to expand the existing rack. This option would also be disruptive to implement, however would not present the same throughput constraints.
- Pickface & layout methodology – SCCG provided a model to review the pickfaces and recommended changes. A warehouse layout is proposed where a single SKU is stored in one pick location, and one location would only store a single SKU. Analysis was done to estimate some appropriate box sizes, and SCCG has worked with the customer to estimate the mix of these.
- End-to-end Warehouse Process – SCCG assisted in defining end-to-end processes for the new facility once a WMS was in place.
