Wide arms, big hearts
From the front lines of disaster relief, here are some tips on what can be done to maximize an emergency DC's efficiency and minimize the labor required.
By Gary Forger, Editorial Director -- Modern Materials Handling, 10/1/2006
Just a year after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, materials handling consultant Jim Apple and I visited Ocean Springs, Miss. Driving into this Gulf town a few miles from Biloxi, it looked like we were in the wrong place.
There was none of the destruction so evident in our drive over from New Orleans. Most buildings were intact. Roofs were in place. Grand old trees shaded the main street that led down to the water's edge.
But once we pulled up to the disaster relief center known as Camp Victor and talked to the volunteers there, it was obvious that looks can be deceiving. Katrina had destroyed 25% of the town's businesses and homes and 25% of its homes. While there had been a recovery, disaster relief is still needed.
Camp Victor is in an old manufacturing plant on Government Street. On a typical night it houses about 150 out-of-town volunteers in dorms. More than 5,400 volunteers have passed through in the past year.
It also serves as headquarters for two Lutheran church relief efforts. One is sponsored by Lutheran Social Services and has focused on rebuilding hundreds if not thousands of homes during the past year.
What Jim Apple of The Progress Group and I had come to see, however, was the distribution center for groceries, personal hygiene products and other life necessities. The DC is about 10,000 square feet and run by the local Lutheran church, Christus Victor.
Since the storm, the DC has supplied hundreds of families a week in three counties and two states. In another few months, the DC will wind up its mission to support hurricane victims.
We arrived on a day when only a handful of people were at work. Furthermore, the DC was officially closed for a few days. So no one was knocking on the door.
Our timing was fortunate. It gave us a chance to talk with some of the volunteers without disrupting their efforts. Two of them, one a Lutheran minister from Indiana and the other a recent college graduate from California, had been involved in food drives for Camp Victor before arriving there themselves. Meanwhile, Doug Brown, a volunteer from Connecticut on his second tour at the facility, had just directed a reorganization of the DC. That said, there were still considerable challenges in front of them.
Facing the challenges
It is worth noting that running an operation like Camp Victor is a huge undertaking with much stacked against its success. For the most part, little is known about what will arrive at the DC before it does. Much of it arrives in less than pallet loads. The work force typically has 100% turnover every week. And to cap it all off, the operation is 98% manual.
While no business would willingly operate that way, those are the conditions. Jim joined me on the trip to offer thoughts on how to make the best of the situation.
Supplies come from three sources—donations, a food bank in Alabama and purchases from wholesalers using church funds. Other than purchases, the DC never knows precisely what it will receive in a given truck load.
All inventory arrives as a pallet load, a case or as a loose item (often packed in irregularly sized boxes). As Jim points out, the objective should be to maximize the number of pallet loads or even cases arriving at the DC.
The minister could not have agreed more. Having filled an over-the-road trailer in Indiana mostly with loose items, he knew first hand how difficult and time consuming it is to handle them. Then he arrived in Ocean Springs just in time to unload his handiwork and found it no easier to manage there.
One of the ideas to come out of this discussion was how to better manage donations for maximum value and ease of handling. For instance, it is least effective when people buy individual items and bring them to a drop-off station. However, many people feel best about making a donation this way. So, there's a tradeoff.
If some of that could be rechanneled to more structured donations, the impact for disaster victims would actually be greater, Jim explains. For instance, a $50 donation could be shown as buying a specified basket of goods. Those dollars could then be used to buy cases of goods from wholesalers, maximizing value and ease of handling.
Received pallets can be easily moved to floor storage, but cases and loose items require some intermediate handling. Cases should be palletized as much as possible. Loose items are best placed in totes rather than remaining loose on the floor or on tables, Jim notes.
Like items should be grouped together in the DC whenever possible. In fact, that was the reorganization Doug and the others had just completed, making significant strides in reducing the time needed to pick items later.
And in a volunteer organization, time is of the essence. With their own upgrades to the system, the number of people needed to run the DC had dropped from 10 to six or seven. But Jim thinks it could drop even further.
He says it all rests on the organization of inventory. People should be able to just pick, he says, without making decisions. That would first require a set list of items to pick. In addition, volunteers should simply follow a straight pick path, selecting a designated number of items from a preset location that was always replenished.
If there were some money available, Jim says a simple non-powered conveyor and flow rack installation would fit in perfectly for such an operation, reducing the labor requirements even further. Total cost would be roughly $15,000, he estimates.
While we went to Camp Victor to develop a materials handling makeover, it has to be said that the people there have done a tremendous job with very limited resources. Or as Doug said so well, "a lot of people felt that the government let them down, but the church didn't." Jim and I couldn't agree more.
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