DC Velocity - December 2011

inbound

Now here’s something truly off-
beat: graduate students in the
Department of Industrial
Management and Logistics (IML)
at Sweden’s Lund University have
posted a homemade music video
called “Mr. Logistics” on You Tube.
According to the caption, it is
“based on a true story of a supply
chain incentive alignment.”
The video, performed in accented English, opens with scenes of
a “truck lover,” followed by three strutting students in ripped jeans
and backward-facing baseball caps singing lines like “They call
him Mr. Logistics, he knows where the stuff is, he’s super efficient”
and “Wake him in the night, he’ll tell you all about forklifts.” At
one point, a student quietly chants over and over, “Tell me your lot
size, tell me your lot size.”
There’s even a shout-out to Prof. Doug Lambert of The Ohio
State University. One student (wearing a gold chain with a toy
truck dangling from it) extols the virtues of a logistics textbook,
noting that it includes “a reference to Lambert, et al., on page 83.”
Watch it at www.youtube.com/user/IMLtlog. ;

“Mr. Logistics”: he’s got the beat

Even in the toughest of times, companies will still buy forklifts. Fifty-one percent of the 600 or so respondents to Crown Equipment Corp.’s proprietary Forklift User Survey said they had increased the size of their fleet over the past three years. Fewer than 10 percent reduced their fleet during the same period. As for the future, nearly half ( 47 percent) of the respondents plan to expand their forklift fleet during the next three years, while less than 5 percent expect their fleets to shrink.

One notable finding was that among forklift buyers, sustainability isn’t just a buzzword. A full 83 percent of respondents said environmental sustainability was an important consideration in their purchasing decisions. And nearly all of them—95 percent— indicated that energy efficiency influenced their choices.

More than one-third ( 35 percent) of the respondents said they believe fuel cells will be important to material handling in the next five years. Meanwhile, 37 percent of survey takers use some form of fleet management software. However, 65 percent of those respondents use spreadsheets as a management tool.

“Spreadsheets can be very useful in managing and analyzing fleet costs, but they can’t provide the real-time visibility required to optimize productivity,” said Jim Gaskell, Crown’s director of global Insite products, in announcing the survey results. He said he expects more companies to adopt fleet management systems that provide real-time visibility in the coming years. ;

What forklift buyers want

WMS or WFM?
Why not both?

Thinking about buying a warehouse management system (WMS) or a workforce management system (WFM)? Maybe you should consider both. Many companies are successfully making a business case for acquiring and integrating both simultaneously, says Dawn Andre, a marketing and strategy director for the supply chain software vendor RedPrairie. Here are some of the reasons why more companies are going this route:

▪ It can make your supply chain “smarter.” Companies don’t want to invest in a system that simply captures data. Bringing WMS and WFM together provides a more intelligent view because the systems can continuously make suggestions for improvement.

▪ It accelerates the ROI for the WMS. The return on investment for a WMS typically is around two years, but the ROI for WFM software is often just a few months. Combine them and your WMS will pay for itself faster.

▪ It improves quality control. Together, the two systems can assign tasks based on workers’ qualifications to operate specific equipment or handle restricted items. If there’s a recall, you’ll not only know where products are but also who touched them and when, helping to narrow the scope of the recall to only the affected products.

▪ It creates a single, comprehensive warehouse “map.” When combined, the solutions can produce a virtual warehouse map that considers products, people, and equipment. This lets them consider a task’s proximity to travel paths to find the most efficient routes.

▪ It improves dock scheduling. Companies can use the intelligence from both systems to schedule their docks more efficiently. For example, they can plan receiving labor based on advance ship notices and data about unloading times.

▪ It helps you schedule labor for wave picking. The combined WMS and WFM allow managers to look across other departments to pull qualified resources if needed to ensure the picking wave is completed within the allotted time.

▪ It makes software implementations faster and cheaper. Joint implementations and upgrades save time, eliminate duplicated efforts, shorten the testing period, and require less hardware. ;