During the day it ships to day-time customers and receives goods.
At night it puts together shipments that are to leave in the morning.
The Just logisticians had a rosy dream to make goods receipt the night shift responsibility. In this case, everything suppliers had delivered the previous day (and they usually deliver in the afternoon – since they put together their shipments and load trucks in the morning) would become available for sale in the morning.And not by the evening of the next day, as it usually happens. The difference is the amount of daily turnover, tied-up in the warehouse; and items not entered in the books are not available for sale.
However, accepting goods during the night requires increasing the
night shift capabilities, i.e. hiring a significant amount of additional warehouse personnel.
And
increased wages as well – since it’s a night job, there is no line of highly qualified and motivated
people waiting for it.
Inability of the night shift at Just to do anything, except
putting together the morning shipments, led to yet another problem: for a customer, the
ordering service cycle instead of ‘order today online – pick it up tomorrow from a store’
turns into ‘order today – it should be here tomorrow, but we don’t know what time, we’ll keep you
posted’.
The ordered products are delivered at night, and if the night shift can’t enter them in
the books, then they will be processed by the daytime shift on a first come, first served basis.
Sometimes,
they can’t get them all done even by evening
And the responsibility of putting together the deliveries ordered
during the day can’t be passed on to the daytime shift, since the next day’s deliveries are distributed among drivers in the
evening after all orders ‘for tomorrow’ are accepted.
The Results of experimental
collecting of goods at daytime according to waybills not yet assigned to specific drivers were
unsatisfactory: the next morning, another shift of warehouse personnel had so much trouble finding
and identifying the prepared shipments, that putting them together from scratch would take almost as
much time.
The problem was solved almost automatically after bin locations storing was introduced at the Just warehouse.
The initial goals of enabling bin location system were (the quite
traditional) acceleration of order batching and relaxation in the requirements for warehouse
personnel qualifications.
However, good solutions are almost always accompanied by a
simultaneous resolving of other problems that at first seem to have no connection with each
other.
In
fact, such cascading effect is one of the main characteristics of a high quality solution – as
opposed to the majority of ‘easy, simple and wrong’ solutions.
Bin location system allowed solving the problem of picking morning orders by the day shift.
A possibility to store not only goods, but also of a set of shipping documents, was entered into the system logic. The day shift puts together deliveries, which are not yet assigned to specific drivers, and then stores them into specifically designated bins.
In the evening, after automatic
deliveries distribution among the drivers is completed, the system knows which bins contain
goods and documents for each of the drivers.
Which they receive next morning without haste,
errors or mixing goods up.
As a result:
- now, the night shift also does goods acceptance. The amount of tied-up goods (= waiting in the acceptance queue) decreased by 70%. That’s several million rubles out of nothing.
- goods ordered by customers now arrive on time.
- as a result of order batching being more even (that’s what’s called ‘heijunka’), efficiency of labor at this section grew by up to 60% — that’s how much the potential volume of shipments grew without increasing the quantity of employees or the payroll.