Lean Warehousing Concepts and Principles

great I think we're ready to start first of all SEL and lien court would like to thank everyone for taking the time out of their day to attend today's lien warehousing concepts and principles webinar my name is Andy Helene I'm with the Georgia Tech supply chain and logistics Institute today our host and presenter is brad boston's brad is a vice president with Lean core supply chain group he has over 17 years of third party logistics experience across automotive consumer goods industrial manufacturing retail and food and beverage operations he trains and consults from Lean core and he is also the instructor for our lean warehousing course taking place September 23rd to the 25th on the Georgia Tech campus Brad is also an instructor for our lean supply chain Professional Series he does a lot of a lot of instruction for us he's a great teacher with that introduction I'll turn the session over to Brad thanks thanks for joining us today so let's start the discussion with the the assessment results so what we provided was was 27 or 27 questions and you were able to rank yourself in your operation on a one three and five so one being unstable or no process no expectation in place three would be functional we have a process but it's a it's a bit loose rarely approved upon and of course five being a high performance formal process in place and we're executing this to our highest level of expectation we have the list of questions it will provide those in the presentation when we follow this but it's also a good tool for use as well so this point there's 27 assessment points and we compare an assessment no different than you going to the car the car person and he's checking your car out and they're letting you know where you know some different areas of your vehicle you might you might look into or even you know going to the doctor and they do a checkup and these are some things that we want to investigate further so a nice tool and a nice way for us to focus the majority of our conversation on some of the weak areas that the feedback provided for through the responses so these are the sections of the of the of the assessment there's basically nine categories and three questions per and you'll notice how they how they ranked from left to right left being highest category and right being lowest very good to see that safety being first and foremost on everybody's focus you know as we work through these these different sections we see there's we start to fall off right around quality at the store standardization and and material flow so let's let's take a look at what those those questions were and how specifically each each the collective responses ranked so see the the first in the highest school was our warehouse processes operate to the pace of customer demand so that's that's very exciting to see as well because what this work all intentionally starts with is customer expectations and we know that lean is about sorter serving and satisfying customer needs at the lowest possible cost but as we as we work our way down you'll see there's there's pretty good pretty good rankings for in the material flow areas safety always always being at the forefront but as we move to the bottom section and you'll see that we've highlighted the five the bottom six areas that we will focus on for this this particular webinar so those being regular gembo walks to occur to identify waste in the warehouse so first and foremost what is gemba mean and some some companies are embracing this and it's essentially a Japanese term for the place where the work is being being done and solving problems at the source the second that we'll focus on as we use process and tack time to determine number of resources required so capcom is something we'll talk about a little bit later so tact essentially is a the german word but that we used in lean and up excellence and it just literally means the beat of the drum or the rhythm of the operation and that's that's typically the the challenge of warehousing connecting the flow through the four walls and out through the customer and supplier so tack time is always a focus for ours as well our team members engaged in formal problem-solving very common to see the problem-solving culture come up in these type this type of work we'll spend some time talking about that we level demand over available working time in the warehouse which very much connects to the TAC time discussion we implement pokey Oaks to error-proof processes so pokey oak is fun fun term and it may be new for some people but essentially it means error-proof so we know that people make mistakes and lean culture we recognize that mistakes happen but where it becomes a problem is when a mistake is handed off to the next customer in line and that could be internal of course and that then become a defect which is something we absolutely must eliminate and then last we focus on standardization of products isolating and eliminating the cost of scheme complexity so we'll talk about the the ABC analysis and our approach to how we would focus on a z' and B's and C's Q's that's we find it a lot different than what the what the industry is doing and we hope wrote this will this will help you following the webinar approach schemes cruise gratification a little bit differently so these are these are the areas that will we'll discuss in the next next 45 minutes so just moving to the next slide you'll see that on average our lowest score was 27 so some folks out there just said you know we're won and absolutely everything highest score was 135 which said obviously some folks that were just a 5 and everything and maybe that's just the way of getting through the assessment but it's quite a range but the average score is just above half right around 80 so we all recognize that there's opportunity for improvement and that's that's what this is all about so we've got a poll question here little it's going to pop and the question is do you teach lean and effects or operational excellence principles all members of your warehousing organization so yes or no question and now you can you can decide which which is most appropriate for you so what you're looking at here with this this visual is essentially the lean warehouse with the call-outs being anywhere from some tactics to some tools to principles and behaviors and I'll talk to some of these specific points but some of you will recognize that these are no different than the manufacturing elements and inputs these are the check marks that have gone into the work that has has become what we known as lead manufacturing in 2014 last 20 years but it's interesting that the amount of supply chain opportunity is is immense a lot of us are recognizing that lean inside of the warehouse is been such a focus over these last five years that it's just gotten a lot of attention so if you look at this this particular call-out it's it's asking for questions like for example visual management is the status of the operation visible so this is a perfect question that when you when we enter a warehouse operation first question we typically want to ask the leader is are we having a good day are we having a bad day and how do you know typically when we go into a factory they're using visual management to isolate hour by hour visibility problems as they come up and we've done a good good job at that in factories but why don't we do that in warehouses we can do that we've been programmed throughout our lives to understand squat to warehouse and it's very difficult to find out if it's a good day or a bad day without actually logging into a system and finding out so our our lean principle starts with the status of the operation and making it visible for everyone to see we believe that that's important because we're all part of the same team and we all need to be serving the same purpose and making that clear for everybody is certainly a challenge and there's different visuals we'll show you throughout this this webinar that kind of helped us helped us attack that particular principle with tools and you'll see you know throughout the callouts different are we doing gimbal walks are we constantly interacting with customers how is our ABC analysis is it based on volume or is it based on stability do we have a formal problem problem solving process safety safety safety we have safety behaviors are they visible how can we tell these things so once again you have a great visual for an assessment that we use quite a bit and it helps us articulate our vision of what a lean warehouse would be essentially so if we look at the poll and our responses show that 27 just about 28% said yes we do Pete's lean and opera affects principles to all members of the organization of course the rest about 72% from 1% submit said no we don't and we recognize that that that's going to that's an issue we recognize that you know as a culture as a culture inside of a warehouse organization we need to believe the same things so it's important first of all there define what is a principle so as we a lot of us are parents a lot of us have have grown up in communities and there's they're just rules then there's things that we just absolutely believe in or things that we we don't believe that we don't need data to tell us these things we've learned certainly through the Shingo Institute certainly through the the gratings of great authors is womack it shook and certainly Robert murder chenko the CEO of lean core and what we're trying to focus on here link horse is the principle based organization so what are those things that are absolutely most important and teach those and from there we'll understand what the tools need to be in order to achieve the alignment on these five mix principles so recognize that there's a gap if we're not teaching principles to everyone then we're going to have conflicting processes conflicting actions and certainly ultimately waste results from from these things so what are those principles in our in our lean supply chain focuses is certainly our the focus of lean cores to optimize supply chains for first we use principles to approach our work we use these principles with rigor and we attach them to every action that we make certainly whether it be in project work in our operations work in our warehousing work but we find that these are the principles that we that we embrace in order to make sure that we're eliminating waste in all aspects of the work that we actually do so we've got seven here and we we encourage that you embrace these principles as well and sometimes you may need some of your own unique principles we found that these these seven are the ones that apply to improving the flow the speed of material developing people so first one being making something visible throughout the fulfillment stream so what does that mean it means that we need to understand what demand really is and we need to see what demand is why is that important because we want to prevent the forecast and the running joke of course of forecast is that there they're never right and the closer that the second rule of course is the closer we get the sort of the lead time in a forecast the more accurate it's going to be so the struggle with warehousing often is that we don't understand what demand is until the day of or the last minute so what we're we're advocating here is that a lot of the work should be around understanding what true demand will be so that we can apply the appropriate work and resources to the inventory reduction create levels flow to reduce variation as what we call the pitch inside of our operation the rhythm and is much much easier to apply resource allocation and predictability problems are much more visibility in level flow organizations you always use pole systems never never push collaborate and solve problems and focus on problem discipline so this this fish here is very deep because it's not whether we have a process that uses pull or push or whatnot this talks about the problem-solving organization this means that as a lean organization we all solve problems recognize that problems are a good thing and we need to make them visible and we all need to respect the processes that that we that we enforce so the problem-solving culture there's there's a there's a lot inside of this this this recommendation but there's also a great benefit in believing in process discipline solvent solving problems increased velocity the drive flexibility to meet customer demand we very much relate velocity to frequency the example I used with with a colleague yesterday is if if I was a I'm going to fly out of the Atlanta Airport I need to get to Chicago if there's only one flight per day and that flight was an hour ago then my lead time essentially is going to be 23 hours 24 hours I'm not going to get to Chicago until tomorrow but there happens to be you know 12 to 13 14 15 + flights to Chicago so the velocity of me getting to Chicago from Atlanta is much higher because there's a lot more frequency so the idea of frequency and velocity coming together just just provides much more flexibility certainly with material planning the obvious challenge would be transportation costs and material handling cost balance that which leads us to the seventh principle is you need to make decisions based on the total cost of fulfillment total cost of fulfillment meaning all of those costs inside of moving products from our suppliers to our customers and understanding that some cost increases while others decrease so we really need to understand all the different elements that go into total cost thinking so let's get into the opportunities so the first the first opportunity that we recited earlier was regular gamble walks to occur to identify waste inside the warehouse so once again gamba with that what that means is is where the work is actually being performed and it's a very traditional organization you'll see you'll see our leaders inside of offices and you'll see you know big the linkspurr apps but not the actual leaders where the actual work is being done there's so much value in actually seeing work being performed and certainly what was something we've learned from from leader standard work as leaders we need to have standards inside of our schedules we need to understand what is important or our the success of our actual role and we absolutely insist that going to the gemba is critical understanding variation waist team member engagement the things that are really important to to lean organization there's there's different questions of course that we could ask when we when we when we go to the gamba but ultimately this is about a deeper deeper standing of some issues I'm reminded of a problem or project I was working on with with a with a customer just a few weeks ago and it was inside the the idea of the problem of certain product with this product shrinkage product shrinkage there was a project team working on this this particular issue inside of a of a nice conference room and outside of the conference room of course was where the work was being performed so I'm coaching the the project team and my you know one of my first questions is did we go to the game but we did we asked the team members and and so we did that as a team and what was what was really powerful is that the the solutions we were coming up with were way off from what we actually saw and what we saw at the gumbo was the packaging was misleading leading to miss pics we also saw empty material handling operators driving by driving by that actual area where it was earlier sighted that there was there was nobody available to do any picking for that area we also saw that there was visual management but it wasn't being used so really powerful literally three minutes of just standing in this this area and seeing some of the issues one of the things that that we certainly see is that when it comes to visual management there's there's literally graveyards of of efforts and failed attempt set at their tools that may have worked in may they have not worked and a lot of them are you know behind the factory or behind the warehouse maybe in the back area and we see these things and that's okay we need to be trying different things out but when it comes to visuals they need to be telling us a story they need to be telling us if there's a problem and the sign of a great visual is one that's being used so visual management and gemba walks go hand-in-hand provided we know that we're where we're going to engage people to do the work and we're looking for problems very powerful activity we encourage that you look at your standard work and those of your team and your warehouse operators and just ask the question how much time are you spending at the gemba and can we standardize this can we make this happen daily or every other day but make sure that it's happening because we catch problems before they become bigger bigger bigger problems clicking the next opportunity in the assessment being process and tact I'm determined to determine number of resources so people are equipment inside the warehouse so this is this is this is an interesting challenge as well when when we approach number of resources required to do the work we want to understand a few a few different elements first of all learners understand the demand then we want to understand the the standard work and process time it takes to do this particular work and from there what we can do is calculate something called tack time which you'll see the calculation is available time over demand so if you just look at this this spreadsheet and this this will be part of what we send out and we've got some some different templates and you're always welcome to our tools is the the daily demand being a hundred trailers and our shifts that ship statistics underneath showing what our working minutes are per shift we subtract all of the non-working time so that's lunches and breaks and we come up to a total working time of eight hundred and forty minutes per day so tack time therefore would be 100 trailers divided by eight hundred forty minutes available working time which tells us that we need to be producing processing one trailer every eight point or minutes and then determine the number of resources required we just take the that that process time divided by the TAC time so for sixty members so let me first say that it's one thing to do some math to a very busy warehouse and tell a warehouse operator that has twice that amount of people that they should only have six because that's that's just not going to going to resonate very well with that warehouse operator there's a lot of problems going on there's a lot of warehouse variation and just just the things that we deal with inside of the four walls and certainly outside of the four walls so what this what this math assumes first of all is that we have stabilized the demand of trailers this means we have a hundred trailers it means we have stabilized the process time so it means it takes fifty minutes every time we process a trailer it also means that were able to level all that activity throughout the day and it also requires some visibility outside of the four walls so what what we're saying here is that in an ideal state it would take sixty members to process 100 trailer with this over 840 working minutes however the work to get to sixty members needs to be inside of those first three points stabilize the demand stabilize the process times Level II activity throughout the day that's where the work should be and most of that activity is certainly is outside of the four walls of the warehouse certainly we can typically control process times but when it comes to demand when it comes to leveling demand we find that there's there's more work that can be done that a lot of time isn't being done because we just don't understand where to focus first so let's look at the third the third opportunity and this is around all all team members engaged in a formal problem solving process or for continuous improvement and and this this is not not probably new to a lot of people there's there's many many problem solving models out there with learn demand we've learned PCA various different a threes root cause analysis since I've applied fishbone and different tools but certainly what we've learned is that if you don't teach this model to everyone in the organization then it will it will not it will not succeed it becomes a tool that's that's run by somebody else it becomes a punitive exercise rather than a learning exercise so we've certainly learned from some of the great companies that have that have embraced some of these problem-solving models is that everybody in the organization is learn them and they're expected to participate in them so once again to be a lean lean culture what does that mean well it means that we solve problems it means that we make our problems visible it means that the people doing the work solve their problems and ultimately we learn from these problems and we apply best practice best practices the cycle continues and continues and continues so problem solving model is a tool certainly the thinking is about collaboration and engaging team members to solve their own problems so that they can they can prevent other ones they come up the fourth opportunity we focused on well just actually before we do that we've got another another quick question so listen this is the left side with that high use of technology versus low and we've got process discipline on the bottom low versus high which would be the lowest performing operation just give a second while the poles come in okay so it's interesting we're getting a lot of C being being the lowest performance operation so C C would wreck would would say that we've got low technology and low process discipline certainly we've got a we would think that B would be your highest performance operation so we're great use of technology but great use great use of process discipline but you know one of the things that we need to be careful about and this is this is the trap that that we often fall in is technology technology technology fix problems if we have a low commitment to processes and we have high technology what we've done essentially is is sped up the movement of problems or we're making waste move a lot faster so we would advocate that the high technology and low process discipline becomes very very expensive we hear the the solution to to some warehouse turnover or warehouse performance issues warehouse lead time a lot of time is implement technology new warehousing management systems things like that but certainly we advocate that good old-fashioned process discipline would be the first thing that that we should be focusing on the fun little question so opportunity for this gets back to the tack time and leveling demand over available time in the work in the warehouse and it's very similar to tack time but this this here just looks at why don't we just do some what-if analysis it's the same spreadsheet but if we had more more if it took more time to process a trailer if it took less time to process a trailer and sometimes this needs to be a daily calculation um you know we've learned a lot certainly from Toyota through the years and their rigorous suits attack time and some of you on the phone call first for certain but not all of us have stable demand that we recognize that so what we need to do in some of these cases is get down into smaller smaller buckets maybe we use rather than the entire week of available time we do this and adjust this on a daily basis but certainly it requires different focus on those inputs that the process times the level in the demand stabilizing and level izing of inputs time studies are a very popular process for people to do sometimes we'll have engineers do these these things but this isn't this isn't something that we need someone else to do we can we can do time studies ourselves the team members doing the work often what we record recommend is the lowest repeatable time of a process typically when you when you measure someone doing a process they they typically speed up so you want to try this over and over and over again and make sure that it's it's a safe work environment so by safe we we mean of course safety in terms of injuries but safe in terms of it's okay to be honest it's okay to to make mistakes it's okay to be to work at the right pace and not a fast pace fast does not necessarily mean right sometimes fast means overproduction and which which we know leads to all the other wastes if we look at some different visuals here you'll see just in the top left corner that we're we're using this is a lean core warehouse operation and what we've done with with the customers is really understand what their what their production schedule is by understanding what their production schedule is we can work backwards into our processes and then use tack time and process time and stable stabilization of those to understand where we need to be inside of our warehouse processes this is a visual that's blown up probably twelve by twelve feet that everybody in the warehouse can see it's the score it's the score of the game that everybody operates - it's the ticker cadence of the operation a different creative use of visual management if the color is purple and you're working ahead you need to slow down yellow and red of course would be bad green would be you're working at the right pace so just some really creative ways to to create that that pacesetter visual and again these ideas were developed from the people doing work the picture in the middle is a much more simplified version of a shipping schedule a plan versus actual what we believe in is fixed frequencies and we measure those those frequencies are we ahead or we do early or late and then problem-solve why we're late and certainly what goes on the truck is the other the other big piece of that something else that a lot of companies are doing certain in the automotive industry is using the yard management system to or a yard just yard management in general necessarily a system but there are systems out there to do this but just to create a buffer so rather than live on loads we're arriving in a trailer we've got a little bit of time and we pull the trailer in and we discipline use discipline product prod process management it to to manage that yard certainly it is more waste so we want to avoid that if we can but it's certainly an option so opportunity five is in around pokey Oaks do we are using pokey Oaks prevent defects from happening I think it's really powerful that peach takes the people to do the work the power of understanding that difference between errors and defects rule number one is never create never pass on a defect rule number two you never accept a defect so it's really important to know what perfect looks like and that's where it starts with do the team members understand what their expectations are and are we hitting those expectations we know that mistakes happen and to err is it's it's human to make errors we like to say there's obviously a certain they need to be part of the solution to preventing these things different examples of pokey Oaks and inside of warehouses it might include stickers and different types of visual management you've got detection types of pokey Oaks maybe noise or visuals that say give you alerts like for example your seatbelt isn't is not on and the 90s that Ford companies started doing this the other companies started doing that as well it just keeps dinging until you put your seat it allows you to drive but it'll it'll drive you nuts now you can also have preventive ones I think there's examples of the you know putting your your your diesel pump in the gas tank or vice versa anybody's done I've done that I apologize for bringing up some some bad memories but the fact that it won't fit in one or the other so these are some different ideas we encourage you to ask the people to come up with their own ideas we've got a website that shows a couple of poking up videos on our on our link or com website and five minute videos they're more than yours to use for teaching and training and sharing with your people different things that have worked along the years so look at number six and this is around skew complexity and if this is this is fun for us to dive into is the ABC stratification if you look at the top of the the visual you see the traditional ABC analysis probably 80% of companies will classify ABC based on volume so for example quarterly volume if you look at 4800 percentage of total cumulative percentage and what we're doing is a Pareto analysis or good old-fashioned 80/20 and we're saying that you know approximately 70 80 percent of our high volume skews they become our A's and what we do is we put those in the front of our warehouses but the problem with with this is it doesn't take into account stability and the movement of these particular SKUs what we will do is approach this a little bit differently and understand what the coefficient of variation is of these of these SKUs so in other words how do they vary do they are they stable do they move every day or do they move only seasonal we could see seasonal products sitting in the front of a warehouse that just isn't moving 3/4 of the year because of the traditionally if you see analysis that's a big problem team members know what they're doing every day and they know what they're touching every day a lot of times you can you can just ask about warehouse layout but here's a great way of doing it and understanding standard deviation of demand from there you can calculate coefficient of variations or a sending rather than be sending on volume so your your your low coefficient variation is very high stable those would be the excuse and touch everyday those would be the ones we put in front of the warehouse very very high-level approach to ABC stratification but this next visual here is pretty powerful because if we plot these these SKUs based on volume and based on demand so looking at both of those inputs really interesting to see that on the left hand side if we have very low variation but really really really high volume then those those are those are mean that's our product if it's a to-go box for example right that's the blue shirts it's the Honda Accord it's the it's the the product that we're all very very very familiar with most of our processes are built around these we don't have to do a lot of planning we can just say things like this will move every Monday morning at 8 o'clock or every Monday Wednesday Friday and just build standards around these things and then improve from there coefficient of up to 0.5 or 50% those are good candidates for pull systems but as we move far far out we'll see huge huge variation and very very very little demand it's a very powerful visual to say to your organization as you're collaborating over skew decisions is why are we even making this are we or making any money on this product in some of you there are certainly leading warehouses you know that this product is now sitting in your warehouse taking up space and it's not moving affecting your turns and that's a lot of time that's your that's your that's your KPI that's what you're going after so we will look at this this flow and we'll understand that sometimes there's this product that just isn't moving and we need to make a decision on what to do with with that product it's just taking up space it's costing us money and in the terms of cost and money this is another nice nice way of taking a look at the cost of carrying inventory you know a very very high level if we were to take a look at raw materials WIPP finished goods some of you might be just finished goods warehouses some of you might be in bath some of you might have some some processes going on inside some value-added but let's just say our average days on hand is is 40 million dollars in inventory what's inside of that the the carrying cost of carrying that number is all the numbers below so we have we have the cost of capital which is money being tied up call that 7% obsolescence so some of it just isn't going to go anywhere so maybe it becomes scrap we have shrinkage which typically results from poor counting sometimes when we do a inventory check the best thing we do is check it again if the numbers aren't right a lot of times the first answer that comes up is best and the actual number one causes of shrinkage is just poor accounting processes damage insurance we've got to now we need a WMS to support these things and of course taxes all the above for an inventory carrying cost of 20% or 8 million dollars of average days on hand so if anybody out there still believes that lien is about a headcount reduction here's a powerful way to say no it is reducing average days on hand is a direct impact on bottom line so we don't want bad inventory this is a this is a very serious issue that that we're all facing so we come to will come to some questions here we're at about 11:45 and there's a few few comments that have come up first I'd like to just just make mention that we're friends from the Georgia Tech logistics and supply chain Institute are on the call here as well and we've got a class September 23rd to 25th at GT at the Georgia Tech downtown Atlanta wonderful facility it's a great class it's very interactive it's going to be three days of a simulation will be myself with with Dave Graham from lean that'll be facilitating the class because you're on this this webinar you will receive a discount it's 20% which is very handsome thank you to our friends Carol and there's there some information where you can you can you can contact them for that for that discount also I'd like to make mention there's a lien inbound inbound logistics class and beautiful Savannah Georgia includes it to over the target DC I don't think we have anybody from Target on the call today good friends of ours and they've opened up their doors for for a tour they're actually facility as well so I don't mean Savannah on September 29 so we have a couple questions and there's three or four asking about whether the slide deck would be available yes it absolutely will be you know the challenge of these presentations is I think it was Roosevelt once upon a time said that it would take them 10 minutes to write a one-hour speech in one hour write a 10 minute speech since we've got a lot of information different tools that we've used we've got videos and they're absolutely yours for for sharing so I think Kelly will be sending the the deck out to everybody that is registered but if you've got some questions than them certainly my contact information is above just look for some more just some other comments I feed it to somebody agreed 100 perspective not achieve 100 percent error free inspections are human too it's a really good point you know and first and foremost we inspection is sometimes required at the end of the day it's it's not about cutting costs it's about achieving 100% delivery expectations and then we work back and reduce our costs so if we're doing inspection then we need to understand why we're doing inspection and there's there's different ways of isolating some of the issues some friends of mine at Lenox have done some really really good work with pic errors and what they're doing is each each and every time there's a pic here there's there's a paredo and our understanding what those main areas are and then we'll work with the team members specifically understand what the problem was but once again they've had to create a very safe environment that it's not that you're in trouble it's that there was a process failure we need to understand why what happened and the amount of improvements that have come from this specific activity it's just absolutely expanding the operations in McDonough Georgia absolutely outstanding just improvements with 5's visual management employee engagement team members are coming up with ideas before errors are actually hung I think there's a good so there's a question is there a reason you didn't include safety audit training and preventative maintenance into your into your daily time no absolutely not in fact that's that's a great call out we have to build time for safety and then this is this is learning opportunity for for link'll as well is where once again I mentioned earlier we're trying to try to build our managed management system and around principles and safety safety behaviors being one of them absolutely we should have standard work focusing on safety teaching people things before before they certainly become become issues I think we didn't focus on safety for this this particular webinar was that the results were so high so we wanted to focus on some of the some of the low areas let's see Lyall you had you had a question around already paying for the class and maybe get a discount now just contact Carol at Georgia Tech the information is is on the slide so she'll work with you on that absolutely I think and there's one more question here it's a good question you talk about how you use pull systems when a call center drops work on the DC and requirement is the ship same day any ideas how to address so great question and here what we have is is very very very short lead time and we're we have cut-offs so for example some of you have to have same-day ship everything needs to be out by 5 o'clock you know the way that we approach this particular problem is that you know we're going to have instance instances like I mentioned Lenox so people's air conditioners they go out we need to replenish absolutely immediately but one thing we do see often is that there there are trends so if we look back in the last six months we can typically count on a particular SKU or excuse family being something that's going to move everyday I don't have an order for it yet but it's probably going to happen so now we start to get into that gray area between forecast and guessing and facility layout but really the work there is once again it's around under understanding what what demand is going to be I think sometimes you know when you lift it as a saline peel back the onion or you look under the hood and we would want to collaborate and talk to customer service and understand those orders and how they're being processed and how quickly they're being conveyed to the warehouse one of the things that you might you might find is that the order was known even hours or two hours before some of these orders are being batch to the warehouse customer service typically doesn't think about material flow they think about satisfying the customer so this becomes a system thinking problem and how can we work together to give me more lead time to how can I make sure that I have the right SKUs at the right place at the right time inside the warehouse and it doesn't happen once it's not a one-time Kaizen event it's constant constant constant because this is this the instability of last-minute orders it's the enemy instability so we want to make that that problem really visible and and know that we're working on it and understand what the consequences are of these things but like I say I think typically you'll find that there's consistency in some of the how these orders are being not only conveyed to the warehouse but the consistency of those skis um there's a question here this is probably the last question Kelly we've got one if I were to do a time study where I suggest watching the best the middle or the worst performer and you know the once again like the idea of processes is that we want to develop excellent processes that anyone can follow and are all following if people aren't connecting to the process performance expectations then there's there's there's a why and there's and there's an understanding of why that's actually happening or not happening but I think I'd want to have definitely a sample of different people doing the process over a period of time reflection but ultimately we should all be doing the same pace there's a really nice tool that I've seen at a hardware distributor well-known company they've got a pace setter inside of their distribution center so what you would do is you you you walk call it 30 feet and it times you how fast you go and typically what you want to do is you want to walk fast but what it's telling you is to either slow down or speed up but it takes safety into account meaning this is the pace we expect you to to be working at so there's there's different expectations that go inside a process but I wouldn't I wouldn't focus on you know the quality of the workers so much as the executional kind of process be executed by anyone I don't need a excellent performer I need everybody to be able to do this process okay I think that's it for the questions Kelly hang over to you yep thanks Brad if if any of you have any more questions you can contact brad at the email address on the screen there and as he stated before we'll also be sending an email to all the attend with links to watch the recording as well as downloads of slides and we'll also be sending out information and the 20% discount code to the lien warehousing course at Georgia Tech and I think that's all we have so thank you for attending today's presentation and have a great day thanks everyone bye-bye you

Channel: GTSCL

Views: 71,117

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Id: 4HWiFiMsAMw

Length: 48min 15sec (2895 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 22 2014