Nearly a decade after their first successful engagement with Carpedia, a distribution services company had seen great growth, and with that growth came the opportunity for further improvement, leading them to invite Carpedia to return.
An assessment identified the following opportunities:
- Poor planning of runs, which had no consideration of margins or profitability, led to poor use of trucks, underutilized workforce, and excessive overtime
- Excessive travel in the warehouse was evident among high volume SKUs due to poor layouts and organization
- Excessive time to issue invoices
Carpedia partnered with the client to improve fleet performance, warehouse operations, and invoicing cycle time.
Key changes included:
- Re-organized SKU positioning in the warehouse for productive put-away and picking processes, leading to regained space utilization, and maximized space availability for improved flow
- Reduced A/R cycle time by improving invoicing processes and implementing appropriate contacts for receivables to reduce days outstanding
- Implemented proactive scheduling of fleet units with calculated margins prior to dispatch
- Implemented planning horizons with pre-calculated margins
- Improved Active Management via Carpedia College and on-the-job coaching
The Results
After the engagement, the client saw improvements in all targeted areas, and felt that Carpedia had contributed to their ongoing improvement and long-term business success.
Specific results included:
- 34 % improvement in Cases/hour
- Fulfillment lines picked/hour improved by 31% and
- 45% at the two warehouses
- 31% improvement in Magazine bundles handled/hour
- 22% improvement in Dock skids handled/hour
- 29% improvement in Highway fleet margin
- 60% improvement in U.S. fleet margin
- 10% improvement in Canadian City fleet margin
- 13% reduction in Customer Service costs
