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FROM PUSH TO PULL
With the new warehouse, those
problems have been eliminated.
“Now we can use a pull model,” says
Aaron Anderson, senior manager of
flow chain at the Dannon plant. “We
can hold product until the DCs want
it based on the forecast and existing
customer orders. That gives us better
accuracy on deployment, and direct
plant shipping saves us a ton of
money.”
Anderson is responsible for man-
aging finished-goods pallets that
come off the 10 production lines in
the manufacturing plant (an 11th
will be installed next year) and for raw
materials heading into production. As a
result, he has a close-up view of distribu-
tion operations. He was directly involved
in planning the new facility, along with
Simon Osborn, Dannon’s vice president
of supply chain strategies, and other
members of the team. He also worked
closely with Peach State Integrated
Technologies, an Atlanta-based systems
integrator, to develop and execute the
construction and launch of the ware-
house.
Peter Sobol, the Peach State project
director who worked with Dannon, says
the yogurt company initially looked at
building a conventional cooler warehouse that would expand on the existing
1,000-pallet capacity. It even had a
prospective design for an automated
operation when it stepped back and
engaged Peach State in January 2011 to
prepare a study on what a new optimal
design might be. That consulting project
eventually evolved into a full-scale systems integration project that included
overseeing development of the new warehouse, which is a food-grade cooler operated at 38 degrees F.
The site for the warehouse, adjacent to
the production plant, posed some design
challenges for the team. For one thing,
there was the matter of space. To accommodate the plant’s production volume—a
volume that continues to expand—the
facility would require a great deal of storage capacity, says Sobol. But the design
was constrained by the small footprint
available on the site. The site is also in an
active seismic area, which demanded a
building that could withstand any temblors the area might sustain. And, with
heavy snowfall each winter, the warehouse
roof had to be able to stand up to a substantial snow load.
More important than the design considerations were Dannon’s business goals.
Dannon wanted more efficient shipping,
close control over inventory, and more
flexibility in storage. The company was
already making use of plastic pallets provided by iGPS, and it wanted to take full
advantage of the RFID chips embedded in
those. The warehouse had to be able to
handle manufacturing throughput rates
