Q
What are you working on as we speak?
AWe’re just coming off our peak season, so right now,
activity is dying down. This past peak shipping season
was the first real test of our new warehouse management
system, which went live last April. As it turned out, we were
able to process over 5,800 orders a day—in less than 10
hours, in fact. That would have taken us two and a half days
with our old system.
Q
Was it the chance to oversee the installation of that
new system that drew you back to Fox Racing?
AYes. I came back to Fox to handle that specific task. I
wanted to lead the selection process, find the consultants, see the implementation process through, and deliver a
successful project.
Q
I understand that you also brought in voice recognition technology. Was that something you planned
from the start or was that something that the folks at Vitech
suggested?
AThat was something that Vitech brought to the table at
the design stage. I was concerned about going directly
from paper to voice and skipping the whole RF generation
in between. What Vitech did was set up a voice pilot for the
founder of the company. First, we had one of our pickers
pick eight orders using the normal process, selecting items
from a paper pick list. It took him 45 minutes. Then, we
trained our founder on the voice system. After just an hour
and a half of training, the founder was able to pick the same
number of orders in 21 minutes.
Q
What did you do differently this time around?
AThe issue with the 2004 installation was that we failed
to clearly define what we were trying
to achieve, and we looked for an ERP
(enterprise resource planning system)
that would meet our distribution requirements. It became clear to me that the system we installed wasn’t going to meet
those requirements, and that was my
major reason for leaving Fox. Basically, we
failed because Fox didn’t define everything clearly.
Q
That’s a critical part, isn’t it?
AIt really is. This time around, my
team did its due diligence during the
selection process. For example, we put
together an extensive RFP that ran over 1,000 lines.
Eventually, we chose a WMS from HighJump Software. I
also hired an integrator, Vitech out of Bellingham,
Washington, to do my configuration. They did a lot of the
heavy lifting.
QIn your view, what’s the key to harnessing the capabilities of whatever technologies you’re using to make
your system run as efficiently as possible?
AMy philosophy is that you can take any system—
whether it’s a Manhattan system, a RedPrairie system, a
HighJump system, or any tier-one system—and it’s going to work. They have
already proven they are tier one. Really, the
critical piece that it comes down to is the
processes. You know, laying out the
processes so that they’re simple enough
that your employees can follow them without having to think too deeply about what
exactly they need to do at this particular
screen. During the design stage, we worked
really hard to make it as simple as possible.
Currently, we continue to do that. We
continue to look at every single process with
a microscope and say, you know, with this
system, how many times are we touching
“X”? Do we need to touch this that many
times? Could we get the system to do some of our thinking?
Q
You’re now almost a year out from the project’s completion. Is it meeting expectations?
AWe have exceeded all of them, basically. We used to be
able to receive about three containers max on a given
day. Now, we are receiving five to six. In our outbound
operations, we’ve decreased our staff across the whole company from 132 to 107. Our goal is to get that down to 83 by
the middle of the year.
Q
Although you’re using a WMS that’s supported by
voice and other types of technology, your operation
isn’t what we’d normally think of as highly automated, right?
ANo, we really have no automation at all. In fact, we spent
less than $16,000 on hardware. That was a deliberate
decision on my part. Fox has been experiencing double-digit
growth in recent years, and as I see it, investing in a lot of conveyors and automated systems could limit our options for
expansion. Everybody says you can take this kind of equipment with you, but really, it is pretty difficult to do that. How
are you going to take it with you when you’re building a new
facility and you’ve still got to operate this one?
