How’s your Marriage Working in the Distribution Centre?

by Chris Coomber

Globalization, along with the introduction of Free Trade Agreements, has been the root cause for the shifting of manufacturing operations to offshore companies. Unfortunately, this trend has put increased pressure on the remaining North American and European warehouses and distribution centers to cut cost and increase efficiencies to be competitive and profitable. An even greater pressure on warehouses and distribution centers is the rising buyer expectations for accurate and timely order delivery.We all understand “Time is Money”, but the question we should be asking ourselves is; “How do we gain more time?” Automation would be the simple answer. Yes, material handling automation has improved productivity by increasing speed, reducing mistakes and eliminating bottlenecks in many areas of the distribution center.However, even with this movement towards material handling automation, the Council of Logistics Management (CLM) has found that most companies operate at 60-70 of their true supply chain/logistics productivity potential.This illustrates that automation processes still need to be optimized and that forward thinking companies must constantly ask “How can we gain more time within the Distribution Center?” An area often overlooked for automation has been the handling of documents; specifically the packing slip. There are many reasons for this such as; the complexity of integrating a solution and the lack of ‘off-the-shelf solutions’.Marrying the right documentation with the right product order is a critical task of every distribution center. Packing slip mistakes and incorrect orders mean dissatisfied customers. Therefore accuracy is essential. However accuracy is time consuming. Traditionally, a person needed to manually print, fold, insert the packing slip into a pouch and apply the packing slip to the shipping box. In most cases this manual approach slows the entire material handling process resulting in warehouse bottlenecks, while increasing the time it takes for a customer to receive their order.Are you up to the challenge?Before reading another word, grab your stopwatch, a pen and paper. If you’re ready…let’s begin calculating how much your manual document handling process is costing your Distribution Center.With your stop watch, time how long it takes you to print/fold/insert documents into a pouch/tear off the back of the pouch and apply it to your shipping box. Record your time on a piece of paper. Throughout the day, complete this exercise several more times and record your results. At the end of the day determine the average time it took to complete this task. Next, divide your average into 60 to determine how many orders you were able to manually complete in a minute. How did you do?Let us tell you how some others did…Many of our customers took our challenge and were surprised with their results. So they did it again and could not beat their best time of 30 seconds per order. They concluded that manually printing/folding/inserting and applying a packing slip enabled their Distribution Centers to get out 2-3 packages /minute at each packing station. So they asked us the question “how can we gain more time on our lines?”Simply automating the process with an Autoslip will gain Distribution Centers more time. In one step, the Autoslip prints, folds, inserts, and applies a packing slip to your package. It is an end of the line automation solution that has a proven track record of more than doubling pack station output resulting in less labor input. It all comes down to this…To maximize the benefits gained from automating their Distribution Centers, companies need to examine the entire automation process, from the start of the line to the document handling process at the end of the line. A truly great marriage occurs when the Autoslip is a part of your automation solution.

Comments? Questions? Email Here

© HowtoAdvice.com

How to Advice .com