Image Enabling The Supply Chain

  This is a leading supplier of shelf-stable, dairy based food, and beverage products for large CPG companies, emerging beverage brands, and private label retailers nationwide. The Company is the partner of choice in RTD beverage industry for top brands and private label retailers for food and beverage products including RTD coffees and teas, dips, beer, sauces, and snacks. They have the expertise necessary to meet highly demanding consumer and regulatory requirements. Their capabilities include retort thermal processing expertise, in-house formulation resources, clean label, and organic production, and more. Recently, this Food and Beverage Processing Company implemented LoadProof – the centralized enterprise photo documentation system for Food and Beverage products. This document describes the benefits that an effective photo documentation process can bring to avoiding load rejects with retailers. Click here to continue reading this article.

It is very easy to look at the adversity, see only doom and gloom and give up quickly. However, real winners see the opportunities behind the challenge. It may be tempting to assume that e-commerce is the new reality, but I believe retail sales still have promise. Let me share a story. Once, a gentleman had a beautiful bone china cup in which he would enjoy his tea, while reading his books. He relished the experience every day. It’s easy to imagine: most of us have relished a nice drink, something to read, and a few quiet moments. One day, he accidentally dropped the china teacup and broke it. He didn’t have another cup and he was unable to find another that was as sleek and as beautiful as the one he had. He was disappointed thinking that he was never going to be able to have such a calm, relaxing experience again. Then he had an idea: he asked a master craftsman to try to fix it. The craftsman knew that he couldn’t make it look like new. He thought for a long time and finally had a c...

  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 struggl...

  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 configuration...

  I would think that electronics OEMs or distributors would be leading the charge toward quality, and I’m sure many of them are. However, the first time I encountered a quality department that did extensive quality control it was in a New Hampshire distribution center (DC) that served the apparel industry. For this manufacturer, the goal was to make fairly priced clothing that delivered good quality to middle-aged women. The Director of Quality at the warehouse, along with her team, did such a good job that this retailer was known for its quality. To meet their quality goals, workers spent a lot of time measuring the tops and pants against strict criteria, checking the cut of the pieces, figuring out how the pieces would look on real people, and making sure that the colors were good for a variety of skin tones. They thought of everything. They took pictures and shared infractions with their vendors across the supply chain. Quality inspection Quality inspection is a relatively simpl...

  Here is another interesting dynamic about  LoadProof . Apparently somebody in their organization is interested and somebody saw the value of the product – LoadProof provides.  We get to talk to them and they’re curious. They want to learn more, and in our conversation this comes up: “hey we already use Google Drive, and we store pictures in Google Drive and and it was great for us”. This was actually a very interesting story. An intern from Georgia Tech, pretty smart kid, but they don’t understand all the implications of using an enterprise system for a recognized supply chain environment. In an established supply chain network, you’re dealing with so many different partners such as vendors, customers, transportation service providers, lumpers, etc., Supply chain is a huge community.  When you spend some time in the industry you understand all these different players and how to work with them and how to maintain the data integrity and still do business maintaining ...

  1. Introduction  Recently, this Leading Transportation and Contract Logistics Company implemented LoadProof – the centralized enterprise photo documentation system. This document describes the benefits of effective photo documentation that helps in avoiding freight claims and chargebacks. This Leading transportation and contract logistics company is a top ten global provider of transportation and logistics services, with a highly integrated network of people, technology and physical assets. Their value proposition is a strong customer service culture that unites their global team. Their workers strive to find new ways to assist consumers in achieving success while also enhancing their own efficiency.  2. Leading Transportation and Contract Logistics – Macro Picture:  This company transports products across the United States. They have a facility in Ohio where they are shipping products manufactured as the cover material for chemical explosives and other products. A...

  Recently, this Leading Transportation and Contract Logistics Company implemented LoadProof – the centralized enterprise photo documentation system. This document describes the benefits of effective photo documentation that helps in avoiding freight claims and chargebacks. This Leading transportation and contract logistics company is a top ten global provider of transportation and logistics services, with a highly integrated network of people, technology and physical assets. Their value proposition is a strong customer service culture that unites their global team. Their workers strive to find new ways to assist consumers in achieving success while also enhancing their own efficiency. Click here to continue reading this article 

  Our actions and decisions are only as good as the data we use to rule them. That being true, when designing complicated systems, ensure the integrity of the data set involved becomes enormously important. Obviously, the data that resides in a system should be accurate. However, it also needs to have integrity, which means consistent and not unnecessarily redundant. A good data set is invaluable. Done well, it puts all of the data elements in one place, making it easy to share, analyze, extrapolate, and use.  Which system owns the data is potentially even more important.  If you want to fundamentally alter the data based on business rule or a business logic, then it should be done in the system that owns the data—so it’s critical to track the lifecycle of the system and to refer users to the primary system for specific data. For example, sales order (SO) information is always owned by an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, since that is where all the aspects of th...

  Back in the good old days (read the summer of 1999), I was introduced to a music and movie club from  Columbia House or the BMG Music Service . You may remember the way it worked: They send you eight CDs of music or movies for a penny. Then they continue to send you titles, and you decide to keep them or send them back within 10 days. If you don’t send them back, your credit card is charged. And, of course, they keep sending you more—to get the free ones, you need to buy a certain number at the full retail price. I was a young professional, trying to learn everything I could about technology and supply chain, and so I found that my friends and I had little time to watch and listen. My roommates and I spent our time working. We were like a lot of people: We didn’t have time to watch the movies and so we sent them back. It got me to thinking about the process that is necessary to process high level of returns. It would have to be agile, slick and fast to process the massive nu...

  Technology changes quickly. Other fields, such as legal and finance, are comparatively slow to evolve. (A friend’s daughter recently told me she chose the finance discipline for that reason: to avoid having to constantly learn new technologies.) Changes do come though, especially as organizations move to keep up with financial reporting requirements. At the same time, technologist know that if you miss one technology way, it’s possible to catch the next one successfully.  In 1999, I was convinced that I had missed the Internet revolution. I could see the potential of the Internet, but also the real possibility of a bumpy ride. I was also acutely aware of my lack of skills or industry knowledge to bring to the revolution. I went back to work, though, and continued learning—and when the next wave came (the mobile revolution) I was ready and started working toward mobile-enabling the supply chain. Now, we’re looking at the next wave, the Internet of Things (IoT) and we’re worki...

  This is a best practice that you can refer to if you have a lot of quality issues in your distribution center. Let us assume that for some reason you opened up the box from reserve. You thought that everything was okay at the time of receiving. Then you put it away in reserve and for replenishment you moved the product from reserve to active location. After opening up the box you find that there are quality issues.  Sometimes during the picking stage they pick the product and they find some defective products or torn apparel. So you realize  that you got to have a good quality process even before the picking process because what happens is typically as the shipment hits your receiving dock you can sort the product by PO or sort the product by  SKU . After sorting you will do the receiving process and then you will do the verification process of the shipment. Verification of the shipment basically says whether you have done verification that means you have completel...

  This document describes the capabilities and implementation of an effective chargeback management system. If you review the “Chargeback Management System – White Paper – Part1” and then review this current document, you will get much more value out of this exercise to understand the Chargeback Management System thoroughly. CHARGE BACK MANAGEMENT SYSTEM What are some of the capabilities that a chargeback management system needs to have? The core of the chargeback system is to have the ability to do the following  1. High-speed picture taking,  2. High speed picture tagging with appropriate meta data,  3. High Speed picture uploading  4. A failsafe repository of pictures  5. High speed picture retrieval capabilities and  6. High speed picture sharing capabilities so that there are no bottle necks added to the current processes Click here to continue reading this article.

This best practice is about making  replenishments  inside the warehouse. It is important to stay on the top off replenishments always in your warehouse. If you have just one shift that you are running it would help a lot. If you spend extra hours in the evening and then do the topping off all your active locations it will be helpful for the pickers in the next shift. In the next morning when the pickers come after all the locations will be full and they can start picking right away without wasting time in replenishments. If you have two shifts running either choose the second shift or have a third shift if possible and keep doing the top off replenishments. There are active replenishment locations and these active locations have Min and Max. Whenever your inventory falls below min, replenishments are going to get triggered or it will get triggered if there is an order that needs a lot of picks from a particular location. This will drive the location down which will trigger a ...

  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...

  The third-party logistics (3PL) business is tough, because it covers a wide gamut of service offerings, that include some combination of: Just move my boxes and/or pallets. Move my boxes and/or pallets and store them in your warehouse. Move my boxes and/or pallets and operate my facility. Own all the labor and activities in my facility. Offer all distribution services for my product (All I will do is download my orders into your system/supply chain). I’ve even run into more complicated models of operation, including both tightly and loosely coupled models.  In a tightly-coupled model, the supply chain systems of the 3PL, including orders, inventory, transportation, advanced shipment notices, purchase orders, and more, are tightly integrated into the shipper’s supply chain systems. All this information seamlessly flows between both supply chain systems of the 3PL and the shipper. They stay in synch with each other and the parties perform the functions in their respective syst...

  “Culture will eat strategy for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, anytime.” This was the first sentence that the professor of marketing and strategy uttered during our first MBA class at Georgia Tech. He underlined his point with the story of how Kellogg’s tried to conquer the  Indian market with its breakfast cereal . The company was trying to sell corn flakes with cold milk as breakfast in the Indian market, a culture that eats a warm breakfast finished with a hot, thick, creamy, flavorful coffee (A quick digression here:  one of the most popular coffees in India is made from the freshest milk, gotten from “only grass” fed cows just minutes before). India already had popular and well-loved breakfast foods: the idli, a fermented and steamed rice cake with probiotic that makes digestion easier and is called “the most healthiest food ever” with double superlatives; and the dosa, a fermented rice crepe. The corn flake with cold milk did not take off as Kellogg’s expected becau...

  Change management and innovation go hand in hand. It is comparatively easy to innovate, however getting the entire organization to adopt that change is trickier, even though we all know that change is the only thing that is constant. In an area like supply chain, where conformity is favored over individuality, changing things gets even more challenging. There are many reasons for it, including: Nobody likes a change in the status quo. People are territorial, and nobody wants to lose their territory. Organizational inertia makes it much easier to do things the same old way. Embracing the “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality. People in general are risk averse. Nobody wants to risk what they have and where they have gotten. So the critical task is not just innovating, but also fostering that innovation in a way that gains adoption. Without buy-in, it’s simply too easy to abandon a truly great and innovative idea. I’ve experienced it in our business. For example, one customer,...