Image Enabling The Supply Chain

  In 1997, I had a half-day training with the leader of the multinational company I had just joined in Bangalore. He started with a story from Steven Covey’s book,  The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People  about paradigm shift: One morning on a subway in New York, people were sitting quietly – some reading newspapers, some lost in thought, some resting with their eyes closed. It was a calm, peaceful scene. Then suddenly, a man and his children entered the subway. The children were so loud and rambunctious that instantly the whole climate changed. The man sat down next to me and closed his eyes, apparently oblivious to the situation. The children were yelling back and forth, throwing things, even grabbing people’s papers. It was very disturbing. And yet, the man sitting next to me did nothing. It was difficult not to feel irritated. I could not believe that he could be so insensitive as to let his children run wild like that and do nothing about it, taking no responsib...

Buying from a Vendor that specializes in this domain is better than building it yourself Today, IT technology is one of the biggest enablers of supply chain efficiency. Organizations, then, are aware that finding or creating the right capabilities is central to business success. When enterprises contemplate implementing complicated IT infrastructure, whether it is hardware, software, systems or anything else associated with such infrastructure, they are faced with a major decision: whether to buy this thing from a vendor or build it themselves. It is important to make the correct decision, or else you might be setting up yourself for a disaster.  Let’s consider the options by weighing the pros and cons of each approach. Build it with your own team This approach involves an IT team with the right skillset and expertise. A project manager, one that has a proven ability to deliver in this domain, would be a critical element well. Pros This approach, properly managed, could achieve res...

  This is another best practice to keep in mind while you’re doing LTL or FTL. We all know that LTL is less than truckload and FTL is full truck load, the full truckload it’s always point A to point B, you load the truck to the fullest and then close it, lock it, and seal it. The loading process should be done carefully with air pillows and load bars/ cargo bars.  If it makes sense to strap, apply the strap, this is all pretty standard for FTL.  After you lock it and then seal it, take the picture of the seal with the conditions of the load before closing the door and upload them to  LoadProof . Whoever has any question, you can immediately show them the condition of the product when it left your facility, so you can prove you did your job right. In the LTL scenario you’re loading in the last-in, first-out sequence.  You are loading in a reverse top sequence so if you are making 10 stops in a town the last stop goes first that means it’s all the way to the deep ...

  1. Introduction LoadProof is a Centralized Enterprise Photo Documentation System (patent pending) for Supply Chain. Recently a HVAC Manufacturer implemented LoadProof in their seven facilities. This document describes the benefits that were accrued and the associated dollar savings. This HVAC Manufacturer is a global corporation that designs, manufactures and sells heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) products, systems, parts and services for commercial buildings. Since 2006, McQuay has been a subsidiary of HVAC Manufacturer Industries, Ltd. McQuay world headquarters are located in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. Products are sold by a global network of sales representatives and distributors. Since its founding in Osaka in 1924, this HVAC Manufacturer has expanded business focused primarily on-air conditioning to over 150 countries. Aiming to help solve social and community problems and grow business, this HVAC Manufacturer strives to meet expectations and main...

  Your Role 3PL Warehouse Manager 3PL Warehouse Director 3PL Vice President Operations 3PL Network Manager 3PL Industrial Engineer 3PL Continuous Improvement Engineer Customer Examples Kenco Group NFI Suddath Logistics Saddle creek Logistics XPO Logistics Ryder Logistics DHL Supply Chain CEVA Logistics Kane is Able Logistics Berner Foods 3PL You could set up at the Site level or could set up at the Customer Account level Your Business 3PL business – your core competence is moving products – you can move products as pallets, as parcel boxes as shipments, as loads – it is all about moving products for other businesses, typically manufacturers or vendors that source product from the far east – because everyone wants to do what they are good at – so as a manufacturer I am good at manufacturing, so I want to find the best 3PL and outsource all my logistics, distribution, delivery, order fulfillment everything to the best in business, so I can do what I do best. An OEM or a Name brand ve...

  If you are looking to upgrade your  WMS  or if you’re getting a new WMS or switching to another WMS or if this is your first time WMS, here’s the another feature to consider. This feature is called cartonization. Cartonization is done among the different carton box sizes that you have for your order, whatever items that are being shipped in that order, you find the smallest box that will hold these items of the order in a pretty tight fashion with enough dunnage. Cartonization helps you to reduce your transportation costs significantly and especially if you do a lot of parcels. If you do rate shopping between FedEx, UPS and USPS you could get even more savings. Cartonization has a lot of other capabilities such as nesting logic and there are a lot of things that come with that you could take advantage of. We had an interesting problem with one of our clients. Their WMS will figure out the fit of all the items in a small box but sometimes the operators would struggle to ...

  Conventional wisdom dictates that a picture is worth a thousand words and stories are worth a thousand pictures. I believe that…and I use stories in my presentation regularly. Of course, picking the right story is critical to making the biggest impact. Sometimes, though, I have an audience that speaks a completely different language. How do you communicate to inspire then? I think the answer is music. My daughter has been singing since she was five, starting by spitting out sentences in a rhythmic pattern and then moving on to making up songs. She starts singing as soon as she gets up in the morning, even when  she’s brushing her teeth . We got her a toy guitar and enrolled her in music school where she is learning to play the piano and the guitar and even to write songs. Now, she even has her  own YouTube channel .  She has really taught me about the power of music. I’m sure you’ve had the experience of being drawn to certain songs without realizing why. ...

  At Smart Gladiator, we work continuously to improve our product. As part of that exercise, we recently decided to install a sensor in our product. Having finalized a product choice on the sensor, we ordered it from the vendor who was glad to send us the devices through UPS. We wanted to install, test, and deploy them to a customer as soon as possible. We are a technology company located in the heart of Atlanta, within the Georgia Tech campus, part of this Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC) that the state of Georgia supports. We work in a big building that house several companies like us. All of these companies go through a vetting process that verifies that they strive for innovation. Most are working to commercialize technology developed at the university by professions involved in cutting edge technology. Many dignitaries stop by our building and we get to participate in discussions with them. Caption: At a round table meeting with Treasury Secretary Jack Lew and May...

  This is a best practice that will be very useful if you have a lot of trucks, trailers, and containers coming into your facility. This is called yard management, so basically this is a small system within the WMS with which you can track your truck’s trailers and containers. You can create yard locations and of course you can create dock doors and you can track them exactly. But it’s all about visibility right, I mean I want to know where my product is, I want to know where my trailer is, I want to know in what area of the yard that these trailers are sitting so that I can track them better. I can have visibility to where it is and what is inside the trailer shipment and all that.  In order to make this work really well, you will have to have a shipment. The multiple steps that are typically done in a yard management system is there is a driver that’s bringing the product in a shipment and he will call ahead to drop them off and to get an appointment. So there have been an a...

  This is another best practice on shipping temperature sensitive products. If you’re shipping temperature sensitive products, like if you’re doing some kind of a food distribution or shipping some kind of pharmaceutical products and perishables, even frozen products things like that.  One thing that you could do is when these are transported, in frozen state then you’re going to have some kind of a refrigerator truck. Even produce goes through a refrigerator truck but slightly not as cold as a frozen product. While transporting such temperature sensitive products you can apply a thermal quilt on the product to make sure the temperature does not go beyond a certain limit or whatever the values that you’ve agreed in your contract. There are thermal quilts available which are thermal wrapping sheets or wrapping material available that you can wrap your pallets with, so the temperature does not exceed.  You can take pictures of how nicely you’ve applied the thermal quilt on ...

  This best practice is known as  location sequencing . It means that when you are configuring your locations for picking purposes, replenishment, and for put-away purposes in the reserve area in the top level position. While doing this you would have picked the naming convention to streamline the picking. On top of it there is also the ability to configure something called as the location sequencing. It means that you do not want your pickers to the same location twice which is also known as zig-zagging.  Optimizing the picking process will make your picking operators to walk less. Unproductive labor such as unproductive walking due to skipping does not directly translate to picking. The more you pick the more you can ship, the more you ship the more you can invoice and the more you invoice, the more money you make.  It’s important to follow the location sequence as it makes everything optimum. I’ve seen in some WMS where while they are picking from the current loca...

  During my technology consulting career over a period of 20 years, I can say, I have been part of a few crazy projects. One of the project was this WMS deployment we did for this hardware distributor. If you look at what was happening globally at that time, it was early 2001, in the US we were coming out of the dot com bust, the interest rates had been lowered so much to get the economy out of this bust effect, so there was this wide spread home buying phenomenon that started happening, people after having lost money in the stock market, decided to invest their savings in their homes, for two reasons, one was that, the interest rates were so low, it made sense to borrow money at such a low interest rate and invest smartly into homes, and two investing in your home was less risky than the stock market. That is when real estate started heating up and in Atlanta, with its sprawling land availability, unlike San Francisco or other smaller cities, there was a lack of space, constructio...

  This best practice is called “implementing global design in the distribution center”. Let us say when you go to Walmart in Atlanta it looks one way and then let’s say you go to Walmart in Cincinnati, Ohio it looks completely different. It will be difficult fit for you to navigate to get even a simple cough syrup that you want to pick up. It will be much easier by the fact that if all the Walmart’s look alike and as soon as you enter and by going to the left you can find the pharmacy isles and you can get whatever you want.  Taking this concept and applying it in your network of distribution centers, which is a big  supply chain network  will be helpful. Typically you are a retailer that moves the product merchandise all over the US. There is typically one in the east coast and one in the west coast or one in the Texas or Midwest and one in the Mid-Tex.  Following this approach you can make all your distribution centers look similar or even from a ...

  This best practice is about the importance of UI (User Interface) in improving the distribution center productivity. In this day and age where Apple and Android have completely changed the user experience that is so easy to understand and use the app. Particularly in the distribution center the time is spent significantly on training the end users. I’ve seen many distribution centers that are literally revolving doors, where personnel come and go. All these personnel go through training for days or weeks to understand and to improve their proficiency in their work. If 50 percent of the employees leave after getting  trained  that’s still a lot of time wasted. Then that’s also a lot of dollars spent on the training time. These kind of training scenarios could be significantly reduced if you choose a tool with a very good UI. The mobile technology is evolving and at the same time it is very important to choose the tools with the best UI because that will not only reduce y...

  If you are looking at little automation in your warehouse this is the best practice to lookout. If you are automating your warehouse in terms of conveyors or sorters or even robots it would make a lot of sense to mark your  SKUs  as conveyable or not conveyable, sortable or non-sortable and as the robots coming everywhere robotable or non-robotable. The last thing you want to do is make a small product or a big product ride the conveyor.  Technically all conveyors have certain requirements mentioned, such as the box size of certain length, width, and height.  The carton’s matching these requirements can only convey through the conveyor. The same requirements for sorting the products using sorter. It could be whatever type of sorter that you might have big sorter or small sorter and even robots. The only difference between robots and conveyors is the businesses. Before it used to change every five to seven years and now the changes happening even faster. Imagin...