Supply Chain Case Study: Efficiency

Whether you are a distributor or manufacturer of product, there always seems to be an ability to improve overall efficiency in packaging. Much of the time this stems from how we started packaging to begin with. Most of the time we start packaging lines or operations at a lower rate of productivity than we get to eventually. Many times we arrive at increasing productivity by repeating then by duplicating the same process we started with so we increase output. The difficulty with this is that any inefficiency that existed originally now is multiplied with the addition of the additional process.

It is at this point that we can help by identifying where these inefficiencies are and offering real cost effective solutions.

Summary

A large fulfillment operation provided services for sending a wide variety of internal training publications, kits, printed forms, etc. for a large retail chain. Orders shipped to any given customer location could be from one to several cases. They found that they were having trouble keeping up with what was required and had grown to a pretty large staff to handle the processing of the orders.

ipc Supply Chain Solutions:

After conducting an audit of the operation, we found that they were picking orders onto roll-around wooden carts with multiple people. One person might have several orders on their cart. These orders were delivered to any one of 9 packing tables where the picker would off load their cart and go back to picking. The person located at the table would again pick up the products, scan them to check for accuracy, select a box and hand tape the bottom, then pack the order. Once finished they would take void fill to secure the products inside of the box. The last steps were to close and manually tape the top of the box then process the case for shipping, then place the case on a pallet. This process was repeated on all 9 tables.

ipc Results and Benefits Summary:

We suggested that they pick directly into boxes that had automatic locking bottoms and transport the cases on the previously used carts. We then proposed a single line conveyor system with both gravity and powered conveyors, which would replace the former 9 stations. Pickers would deliver orders in boxes to the infeed of this line where an inspector, who would check them, then transfer them down stream to a single void fill/ tape machine operator who would complete the closing and taping of the case. The finished cases were then continued down the conveyor to a pair of shipping stations where the final shipping processing was completed. They used one final shipping line most times but had the second line in case of the need for added processing speed at the shipping station. The entire expense for the equipment was about $10,000. The tape and void fill machinery was provided on a monthly user fee basis rather than sold directly.

Testimonial:

"IPC looked at everything we did in our process including the types of boxes we were using and came up with a solution that cut our labor to the tune of about $80,000 per year. This more than paid for the equipment and the increased cost of the boxes with the locking bottoms in the first year. In addition to cutting labor, we were able to increase our output from about 600 orders per day to over 1000 since we could process so much faster. Until IPC pointed out some of the flaws in our process we would have probably just added more tables and continued to do things the way we always did"