Incoherent Dock Operations
$100,000 in capital while increasing storage space.
Case Studies
Business Issue
The client was running out of room to stage finished customer orders. Product would move to the shipping dock and ‘park’ wherever there was room. When it came time to load the delivery trucks, it was a treasure hunt across the whole dock to find all of the customer orders. With an additional 30% growth expected, the client knew that the current mode of operation would lead to chaos.
Approach Used
Flow Consulting worked with leadership to evaluate various alternatives to expand dock space that included a plan to add more vertical storage. A quick inventory aging review concluded that finished goods were arriving on the dock out of sequence; order produced earlier than needed were clogging the limited dock space. A purge and a change to the production scheduling routine got the dock flowing again.
Results
The business avoided spending $100,000 capital to increase finished-goods storage space, while also reducing customer order lead time by 15%.