technologyreview WMS SOLUTIONS
brands. In addition to ice cream, Frozen Gourmet distributes frozen pizza, carrying Kraft Pizza Co.’s Tombstone and
DiGiorno lines.
Distribution at Frozen Gourmet follows a pretty straightforward process. Suppliers ship merchandise in truckload
quantities to the distributor’s 10,000-square-foot warehouse in Redding, which holds about 175 mixed-load pallets in two-level rack storage at a temperature of minus 20
degrees. There, a crew of eight warehouse employees
receive, pick, and ship products in two shifts.
Workers fill orders by selecting boxes from the pallets and
then loading the boxes on transport racks (each rack is designated for a specific store). They then load the transport
racks onto the route trucks. The company makes deliveries
at night using its 10-vehicle private fleet.
Although Frozen Gourmet’s operation is relatively
uncomplicated, it’s a fast-paced process. Inventory turns
are high, with 80 percent of the warehouse stock turning
each week, according to David McDaniel, the company’s
warehouse manager. In the past, keeping track of all of that
fast-moving inventory was something of a nightmare—for
example, if the distributor wanted to check on product
availability, it often had to resort to walk-around checks. So
when a manager at Dreyer’s mentioned the SmartTurn
solution, Frozen Gourmet was ready to listen.
POWER AND CONTROL
The ins and outs
Today, there’s no longer any confusion about what’s on hand
in the warehouse. The WMS automatically keeps tabs on
what goods have arrived and what’s been shipped. “I now
have daily visibility into inventory status,” says McDaniel.
The WMS also keeps an updated record of what inventory
items have been allocated to specific orders, so the distributor
always has current information on actual product availability.
The WMS tracks orders by interfacing with the company’s
existing Direct Store Delivery (DSD) application, which functions like an order management system. As they make their
rounds, salesmen or “pre-writers” record orders from their
grocery and convenience store customers on handheld computers, downloading those orders into the DSD at the end of
the day. At the same time, the route drivers who service mom-and-pop stores are out replenishing their customers’ stocks
with product from the back of their trucks, recording the
transactions on their handheld devices for later DSD download. The DSD outputs the customer orders into an Excel
spreadsheet that’s imported into the on-demand WMS.
On the inbound side, the on-demand WMS maintains an
automatic record of warehouse stock based on the information workers enter as goods arrive. It has also allowed the
company to automate its purchasing process. In the past,
McDaniel faxed orders to Dreyer’s in Bakersfield, Calif., or
Kraft Pizza Co. in Little Chute, Wis. But that sometimes led to
errors, particularly with the Dreyer’s orders. Frozen Gourmet
and Dreyer’s use different item numbers for products (Frozen
Gourmet uses a six-digit code, while Dreyer’s uses a four-digit
one). That meant that whenever he placed an order with
Dreyer’s, McDaniel had to look up the corresponding numbers in a Dreyer’s catalog. “If I made a mistake, I [ended up]
getting something I didn’t want,” he says.
Nowadays, the WMS issues the purchase orders, automatically translating Frozen Gourmet’s item numbers into the corresponding Dreyer’s numbers. After it generates a purchase
order, the WMS e-mails it to a supplier. “It’s much easier than
writing everything down and faxing it,” McDaniel says.
When the merchandise arrives at the Redding facility,
workers use a copy of that purchase order to verify receipt of
the merchandise. They then enter the receipt information
into the WMS, and the cycle begins again.
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High visibility
Since it began using the on-demand WMS, Frozen Gourmet
has seen stock-outs decline, even during the peak summer season. The distributor also is able to respond to queries about
product availability more quickly and with greater confidence.
And there’s no longer any need to send someone into the
minus 20-degree freezer to do a walk-around inventory check.
Now, all McDaniel has to do is type a product code into
the WMS. “If there’s going to be a big sale and someone
asks, ‘Do you have enough?’” he says, “I can look in [the
WMS] and see I have this much on hand and this much on
order, so I’m going to be OK.” ;
