DC Velocity - May 2010

acrossthedock

rethinking the packing process

Re: “avoiding pitfalls when setting up a packing station,” April 2010

I follow the new Perfect Order Index philosophy that Kate Vitasek at Supply Chain Visions developed. The packing station is critical to this philosophy because each time a human/operator is introduced, there is a possibility of a bottleneck or, even worse, of something being done incorrectly. We automate the packing station, sometimes changing where the manual tasks are/were located within the DC.

With the e-commerce, e-retail order profile being small and fast-paced (one of my customers outputs +60K orders per day in its busy season), it is often necessary to look at the day’s orders and simulate them before releasing them to the floor in order to achieve the shortest time from customer input/order to shipment arrival. There also must be no mistakes, or all profit will be lost for many orders.

Sometimes completely rethinking the process from order start to order finish is required. If all components of the order are given equal weight—carton size, void fill quantity, documents, labels, product, release time, zone release, and arrival at shipping dock, to name a few—then the order in which these processes are performed can be changed to give the best solution. The customer discussed earlier placed its “intelligent order release” for carton size, labeling, and invoice all at the order start and not at the end, where it is traditionally done. The results were tripling the throughput in the same DC space.

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