Warehouse Efficiency

Warehouse Efficiency

Personal Care Limited (PCL) is a large and premier FMCG company in India with a turnover of about Rs 2000 crore. It has 85 production plants spread over the whole country, producing about 1200 products ranging from perspnal care to household goods.

The company has four of its own mother warehouses situated in the four zones of north, south, east and west that receive products from almost all the plants on a regular and consignment basis in containers by road. These warehouses are responsible for taking care of stocks, order placement for next arrivals, loading and unloading, protective storage, stock recording, apart from order processing and trans-shipment of goods to C&F agents of respective zone whose numbers come around 150 per warehouse.

After receiving goods from various plants, these warehousing are first entered into the computer for inventory recording purposes. Suitable storage location spaces are then assigned after taking into consideration the quantity to be stored, the physical dimension, characteristics of items, frequency of flow, and availability of the space, which is quite variable and flexible. For storage of goods, flexible racking system is used so that the size of a rack's space can be changed as per the size on the product's package. Furthermore, racking is back-to-back in pallet blocks which are 5 storeyed and in one block, there are about 400 back-to-back rocks.

In certain areas, for selected heavy weight and bulky items, 50 selectors drive forklift trucks and in the remaining areas, as many as 350 selectors pick the goods manually and use hand trolley. Selectors are normally less educated and highly experienced, who have well-defined areas of selection.

With this existing system, there have been a lot of practical problems, such as under utilization of space, traffic congestion is aisles between the racks as one selector blocks another's progress while he is picking items from a location, wrong assortment, difficult to track goods, difficult to fill one single order as it contains a variety of items, etc. Furthermore, a trucker is required to collect items from different places of the warehouse to make up the order. Frequently, they have to wait for a full load. Then, the driver had to collect challan and other required papers. Normally, this whole process took seven to ten days, subject to ready availability of the goods in the stock. In the case of stock-out items, it may  goes anywhere in between 15 and 30 days. That is why replenishment. cycle time for nearby C&F agents' is about 15 days and for others, it comes around 3 weeks.

Due to a gradual increase in the quantum of competition and increasing customer expectations, along with increasing awareness about the overwhelming contribution of L&SCM in cost reduction and service improvement, the top management of PCL have appointed highly qualified and experienced professionals at all four warehouses with the following objectives:

• to improve the efficiency of the warehouses;
• to reduce the replenishment cycle time by 25 per cent;
• to reduce the total logistical costs by 10 per cent; and
• to have transparency in dispatch of premium products.

Mr A.K. Sinha, who joined the north zone warehouse as chief warehouse manager, has had a very successful career of 25 years. He wants to redefine the whole warehouse operating system.

QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW

1.    How should Mr Sinha approach this problem?

2.    Develop a strategy to overcome the problem and fulfil the redefined objectives of the firm.

3.    What changes would be recommended for the implementation of the new strategy?

4.    Suggest measures for evaluation of performance of the warehouses