Image Enabling The Supply Chain

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 these p...

  Your Role Warehouse Manager Warehouse Director Vice President – Operations Director of Logistics Industrial Engineer Continuous Improvement Engineer All of these folks ship Heavy Industrial Expensive Products, some customer examples are Daikin Applied – Ship very expensive HVAC Equipment – to large commercial builds such as Offices, Hospitals, Schools Bosch – Ships Automotive products to other OEM Auto makers – Fuel Injection Pumps, Bosch Spark Plugs, Engine Management, Ignition Parts, Batteries all kinds of Auto Parts Sealed Air – Air Bag machinery to Distribution Centers NCR – Point of Sale Systems for Retail Stores, Point of Sales Systems for Gas Stations that connect with the Gas Pumps Stryker – Hospital Beds Your Business Manufacture, Assemble and Ship all these heavy industrial products on time and to the right place in perfect condition so the deployment of these heavy industrial products can be done smoothly as part of construction or starting up new facilities that is al...

  It’s true that necessity is the mother of invention. Creativity, though, is the father, and knowledge is the midwife. As people, we are wired for survival. When we are in tough times, our creativity and persistent shine through. By staying focused and thinking creatively, we can come up with solutions and take advantage of each opportunity as it arises. I know that from experience. When I graduated from college as a mechanical engineer, I was hired to do software development because I had math and public speaking skills. I wanted to succeed and thrive in that job, and I kept pushing even though software development wasn’t my forte when I started.  Later, I wanted new challenges, so I leverage my grit, persistence and necessity to reinvent myself as a solutions architect and a leader of consulting, technical, operations and integrator teams. The challenging world of third party logistics (3PL) is ripe for a similar approach. Margins are thin. It’s hard to make money. Inventiv...

  Another best practice that you can implement in your distributions center is something called appointment scheduling. So basically what this means is when the truck drivers are arriving to your DC or when when they’re about to come to your DC they call ahead through their transportation companies and say “hey please give me an appointment, and I’m going to be there at this time, this date”. Booking the appointment makes it easy to make sure when the truck arrives you have  a dock door that’s open and people that are ready to receive this product, so the truck driver can come drop off the shipment and then leave. From a transportation perspective it is very efficient for them. When you work with them by having an appointment, and not make them wait then you will be able to get better deals with the transportation provider. This is helpful especially if you’re paying for the freight transportation.  I still remember, it’s so fresh in my mind and this was as part of MBA – ...

  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...

  This is another best practice that you can use in your warehouse. I think this is more for a  LTL (less than truckload) like a within a town delivery. You are not doing a long-haul driving like 100  miles or 200 miles you’re making in town delivery in a LTL fashion. For example, if there is expensive furniture that you’re delivering and you don’t want it to get scratches and dents, if it’s a minor damage while you’re moving or while you are loading it on the truck and so forth, you can obviously cover the furniture with the nice cloth and then strap them to your trailer itself.   It’s again common sense if you think about it, but again the  3PL  people know this pretty well. If you are new to this type of shipping this is something that you want to think. This is something that you want to think about while you’re loading to make sure that your product gets delivered in a pristine condition with no damages, scratches, and dents. With all that traffic...

  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...

  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...

  Your Role Warehouse Manager Warehouse Director Vice President – Operations Director of Logistics Industrial Engineer Continuous Improvement Engineer 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, th...

  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. 2. Leading 3PL Company Supply Chain – Macro Picture  This leading 3PL Company has two...

  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...

  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...

  When I first saw Google glass, it took me back to 1995 and the release of the action film  Terminator 2 – Judgment Day . A bunch of us sophomores got all excited about the movie and went to see it as a big group with much anticipation. The scene that got deeply engrained in my mind was the Terminator Arnold Schwarzenegger entering the bar scene, starts scanning the objects around him to find an outfit that matches his size. That scene became the holy grail of augmented reality: in which a wearable or other device makes the person wearing it by disseminating information about objects in the vicinity in order to add immense value. Imagine going to a trade show and your glasses scanning passersby, providing name, title, company and a mini biography, and maybe more: a glimpse of what problem is keeping them up at night, what goal brought them to the trade show, and what they want to get out of the event. By having this type of information through a wearable device, you would be ...

  This warehouse best practice is called the directed putaway.  Putaway  is a process of moving the product after receiving at the receiving dock. The product gets received and either cases were built or the pallets were built and now these cases and pallets have to be put-away in their reserve location. The way it works is the product is moved from the receiving area to the reserve area in so many different ways. The user will find the first open location and just stick the load there and that is called the suggested put-away, and this is not completely the user directed put-away. In the user-directed put-away, user just finds the hole and sticks the load there and it is a complete wrong way of putting the loads. It makes sense when the volume is so low, but in a high volume scenario you need to follow a systematic process directed put-away which makes a lot of sense because you could configure your rules, based on the segmentation of the products like consumer good...

  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 ...