Warehouse Management and Best Practice
Our expert Consultants can support you if you are experiencing low productivity, wondering how your productivity compares to your competitors, or require support to make improvements. The Supply Chain Consulting Group (SCCG) team can help you to optimise your warehouse operations, and understand that each clients’ requirements will vary, from business to business, according to changes which occur within different times scales and situations.
SCCG specialise in advising on resolutions for customer complaints due to poor picking accuracy and/or poor stock accuracy, whilst also advising on the optimum way to adapt to changes which have been made, regarding warehouse reconfiguration to best accommodate any newly introduced requirements.
The SCCG team are experienced logistics and supply chain professionals, who have worked closely with clients, across a range of sectors and countries, and have successfully improved or expanded their warehouse and distribution centre operations, providing capacity and productivity solutions in fast-changing business environments.
We audit your operations against best practice and highlight areas for improvement. We then work with your team to develop an action plan; classifying action resolutions, by size of benefit, and ease of implementation.
Benchmarking
Whilst Benchmarking serves as a critical performance indicator within logistics and supply chain operations, such comparisons of course need to be analysed in context. Accurate Benchmarking can help a business to determine whether it best to base comparisons on a cost per unit or cost per case, basis.
Identifying high-performance, and best-in-class operations and analysing how these can be achieved; benchmarking is a concise form of performance measurement which not only externally evaluates the individual performance of companies against each other; but also uses the same analysis to determine the performance of different operations within the same company.
Our Approach to Benchmarking
- Build up a model of what the operation should cost based broadly on current practices
- Compare this to the actual cost and identify key areas of variance
- Understand the drivers behind these differences and distinguish between whether change is possible or desirable
- Introduce competitor measures where appropriate to build context; create an understanding of the key differences compared to competitors (e.g. delivery frequency, singles vs. case picking etc.)
- Performance measurement is essential but used wrongly it can encourage wrong behaviours and perpetuate silo-based decision making.
It is important to consider how all the performance measurements in the business interact to move the company towards its goals. The SCCG team have successfully established effective performance measurement regimes in new and existing operations across the UK and Europe.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to be measured should
- Have a strong identifiable relationship to costs and / or other metrics aligned with company goals
- Be commensurate to the scale and type of operations
- Not be too numerous – concentrate on key indicators
- Not incur undue cost / effort in measuring and reporting
