Image Enabling The Supply Chain

  Your Business You distribute food products, which could fall under Dry, Produce or Frozen categories You distribute alcohol products You distribute pharma products While doing this you often run into OSD issues, Overage, Shortages and Damages Overages – You shipped more than ordered, which could result in non-compliance chargeback Shortages – You shipped less than what was ordered, which could result in non-compliance chargeback Damages – Your products arrived damaged, which would result in a rejected load or a damage claim While shipping food products it is also very important to clean the trailers thoroughly in order to comply with FDA requirements, I had a customer once they would write lines and lines of cleanliness description in the system after washing their trailers thoroughly, so just in case something happens, they can go back to their customer and show them how well they have been cleaning the trailers Another challenge while shipping produce or frozen items is that, y...

  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...

  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...

  This is another interesting question that came from one of our customers and this was like “hey we have this problem where we are shipping these pallets and somehow these pallets are broken into two and and they get delivered as two different pallets”. Even though they tell the carrier or whoever they are shipping through that nobody’s supposed to be doing that.  What they found out was that the solution was to fully shrink wrap the pallet and then fully seal it with a security tape around the pallet and then add a sign saying “do not separate pallet”. There are stickers that you can use as a label or even print a sheet of paper and then add do not separate pallets in a different color or even in a red color so that they know they’re not supposed to separate this pallet.  Also it’s better to apply a security tape so if the security tape is tampered with, you can show “hey look at these pictures when it left our facility this is how it was shipped and it’s all supposed t...

  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...

  Photos & Videos are very important Data that need to be cared for like any other vital enterprise data such as Purchase Order, Sales Order, Item Master etc. Data is the new oil of the Digital economy.   It has been said that data in the twenty-first century is like oil in the eighteenth century. I don’t agree with this 100%. Like oil, data has to be refined before it is used, and it’s only as valuable as the insights that are drawn from it. Further, oil is a limited commodity, and we all know that the deluge of data is getting bigger every day. And with the proliferation of sensors everywhere, especially in mobile devices, it is much easier to gather data from business operations and also get much better insights from it. We are data rich, but information poor ,  this is changing with the rise of AI, ML and the cost of computing power going down significantly experts are able to run several analytics models and cull out some deep insights from the data that is avail...

  This best practice is about measuring and improving warehouse productivity through  LMS , which stands for labor management system. There are typically two segments of customers that will benefit significantly from an LMS, one is this huge ERP – vendor who supplies WMS. For example we will take SAP.   SAP’s core was ERP and they still developed and integrated the WMS because many of their customers have integration challenges with other platforms. They gave them the WMS and because their core is ERP there is no solid LMS that works. They should be buying some other LMS and integrate into the SAP’s – WMS which is a cumbersome process.  The second thing is that there are small companies with just a hundred thousand square feet or two hundred or three thousand square feet with anywhere of revenue from 10 million to let’s say hundred million, two hundred million. They don’t have sophisticated LMS and for that reason they are not able to measure their employees wor...

  1. Introduction   Recently, this leading 3PL company implemented LoadProof – the centralized enterprise photo documentation system for Kellogg’s1 products. This document describes the benefits of effective photo documentation that helps with avoiding freight claims and damages. This company has been established at the beginning of the 20th century, and since then it has grown into a Fortune 500 market leader with more than $6 billion in annual sales. For over 50,000 customers, they work behind the scenes, overseeing essential fleet, transport, and supply chain functions, many of which generate the goods that consumers use every day. When customers select this 3PL company they get access to industry-leading technology, which has one of the largest fleets of trucks in North America and an extensive system of maintenance facilities and warehouses, and some of the industry's most talented people. Click here to continue reading this article.

  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. All DC’s follow quality processes. Typically, there are two...

  This is another best practice that you can follow while you’re loading your products in the trailer container. It’s always important to do a great job loading and obviously your team did a great job picking the product, boxing the product, and then nicely stacking them in pallets. The pallets are then shrink-wrapped and ready to go.  It’s important to load them perfectly because while the truck or the trailer is going there are a lot of bumps on the road, there’s a lot of traffic and the truck could go steep uphill and steep downhill. I’ve driven so much in the Tennessee area, into the mountains and all kinds of things happen. When all these happen there are G forces that act on the merchandise that you’ve shipped which could shake the product and also tilt the product sometimes.  If you have expensive  SKUs , these unnecessary shakes can still create damages. Even though the truck or the trailer might have the best shock absorber it’s not a good thing as your prod...

  This is another video on the best practices that you could follow while loading the product in your distribution center. One important thing that you could do is applying the right labels on the product, because when people see the labels they would be careful while handling these products, the  pallet , and the merchandise. When you tell them with the label ahead of time they will be a lot more careful about doing their job and this is even more about human psychology. For example to my developers I prepared this design document, so what we do and that’s a rule that we follow throughout our organization. We put a lot of care in preparing the design spec or whatever we do if it’s a screenshot we do a lot of care and prepare a thorough document that not only addresses all the requirements but also looks clean and nice and because when things are beautiful and they look clean people trust them more. So the same psychology applies here as well, when you are shipping so...

  Your Business You ship parts You source the parts from the manufacturer and ship them to your customer If you really think about it, these are products that are purchased because somewhere a big machine or equipment is not working and needs this part. So somebody is waiting for this equipment or big machine to be fixed ASAP so they can complete their project. So it is very important as a Warehouse Manager you do your part of the job thoroughly and deliver them on time. Obviously not only do the job and also keep proof that you did your job right to show it to other parties in the Supply Chain So when your parts arrive on time, the other resources, tools, experts that are needed to finish the project or other projects finish their part and complete the project on time Let us say there is this large excavator that had a part broken, then they have to order the part ASAP, get the part shipped, receive the part and then replace the part, until then there are multiple resources, both ...