DC Velocity - April 2014

Art van Bodegraven may be reached at (614) 893-9414 or avan@columbus.rr.com.

You can read his blog at http://blogs.dcvelocity.com/the_art_of_art/. Kenneth B. Ackerman, president of The Ackerman Company, can be reached at (614) 488-3165 or ken@warehousing-forum.com.

52 DC VELOCITY APRIL 2014 www.dcvelocity.com about this? A third-party logistics service provider (3PL) for a tier two automotive supplier assembling wiring harnesses worked inside the customer’s facility, integrating the flow of its component into a deliverable component for the ultimate manufacturing and assembly customer.

Co-location? You bet!

The first example dates back some 15 years; the second has been in place for over a dozen. So, how new is this co-location concept, anyway? And is it stretching a point to try to tie this “new” development to an event that, while it may be current events for us, is likely ancient history to you?

ON AND ON …

More likely, we think, is that this vaunted co-location is just part of the continuously evolving way we execute processes and concepts of long standing in our profession. Just-in-time, for example, didn’t go away; it merely put on a new dress. And it wasn’t new in the early ’80s when we thought we imported it, along with some Datsuns and Toyotas, from the Land of the Rising Yen.

We keep, like some sort of perverse Groundhog Day,
repeating this rediscovery and reinvention process. A few
years ago, we—the trade press, the movers and shakers,
and the consultants—fell in love with the concept of ful-
fillment. And that was well before information technology
b
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ict
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g

and omnichannel whatever. What we forget is that a little catalog retailer out of Chicago built a fortune that endures to this day by doing fulfillment. Customers sent in orders, with some arrangement for payment, and people fanned out inside an enormous distribution center, selected the ordered item(s), and shipped it/them to the customer.

The differences? Orders arrived via U.S. mail, no information technology assigned shelf locations in the facility, and pick waves were not computer-generated. No computers, no FedEx, few complex algorithms, no Excel, no control tower. But the company, the brainchild of a fella named Sears, somehow managed to satisfy customers, shipping brassieres, long johns, hammers, and even entire houses.

THE MESSAGE

Cool your jets, cowboy. What’s new under the sun may not be nearly as important as making what we’ve got work better. That approach has served us, planetwide, pretty well—to the point at which we can scarcely recognize what we started with.

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