Getting off to a fast start
Streamline moving materials and data with ADC, crossdocking, and flow-thru processes and you'll finish far ahead in the race to serve customers.
By Staff -- Modern Materials Handling, 5/15/1999
Receiving and putaway operations are starting line activities. It's here that businesses begin the race to beat competitors. It's the first few miles of a marathon to save time, to cut costs, to trim inventory, and to speed up service to customers.Along with these goals, there also are somewhat conflicting, yet concurrent demands to meet in receiving: Not to damage incoming raw materials or finished goods and not to sacrifice accuracy or performance.
Receiving and putaway are where the physical flow of materials and the parallel flow of information on received items join and must be efficiently, swiftly routed downstream in synchronization with one another.
What's changing in today's plants and warehouses, however, are a number of the old ways of doing business. Computers must take over for paper and pencil methods. Crossdocking should be tried as much as possible. Flow-thru and staging (rather than storing) need greater emphasis.
Manual receiving needs to become history, for example. Continuing to rely on manual receipt of goods with paper and pencil steps in the information flow-such as reading a purchase order, checking quantity received, or assigning a stocking location-is too slow. Paper shuffling on the receiving dock increasingly is a factor that marks a second- or third-rate competitor compared to top firms.
Receiving must proceed with both the greater speed and higher degree of accuracy provided by the automatic data capture (ADC) and electronic information processing technologies.
Employees on the dock will need to be equipped with bar code scanners and radio frequency data communication (RFDC) terminals. RFDC units mounted on the lift trucks used in receiving and putaway will further expedite paperless processing.
All the data collected electronically must be managed electronically as well for greater efficiency. A warehouse management system (WMS) can do so readily.
Within the receiving department, WMS software, fed data from bar code scanning and RFDC units, will perform such functions as identifying and recording receipts by stockkeeping unit (SKU), updating inventory, directing putaway, and assigning storage locations.
Even with WMS capability internally, your facility's receiving operations need to be linked externally by electronic means to upstream members of the supply chain. With electronic data interchange (EDI) links to inbound shippers and transportation companies, the receiving dock will know ahead of time what's due when, and in what quantities. With the type of EDI transaction known as an advanced shipping notice (ASN), moreover, dock managers can preplan how they'll handle the inbound materials flow for highest efficiency.
More crossdocking
Armed with precise information on inbound shipments-along with similar data on outbound orders- receiving management can then crossdock as much as possible of what's received. Inbound materials are matched with outbound orders so that finished goods can flow directly to the shipping dock, or need only to be staged very briefly in an area set aside for them before loading onto outbound trailers.
With crossdocking, time spent within the warehouse by individual goods is short. Items never are stored, never fully become warehouse inventory in the old, conventional sense. They may be staged only for a period of hours. Handling is minimized, moreover.
Research by Arizona State University professor Arnold Maltz for the Warehousing Education and Research Council (WERC) finds that crossdocking is one way that today's warehouses are increasing inventory "velocity," reducing cycle times, and moving towards more of a flow-thru orientation. Dr. Maltz, who also serves as WERC research director, notes that his survey found that "high-performance warehouses are crossdocking 50% or more of their incoming goods and setting targets of 25-50 (inventory) turns per year."
WMS, EDI, and RFDC systems for inventory tracking, Dr. Maltz also observes, "are becoming mandatory to participate in large consumer distribution systems."
Matching inbound receipts with outbound orders for crossdocking may require use of sortation methodology and/or technology somewhere between the unloading and loading operations. Otherwise, the right goods may not get directed onto the right, outbound over-the-road truck.
Lift trucks can serve as your crossdocking transportation method. They are multipurpose vehicles well suited to this additional role.
Or crossdocking can be performed by other equipment, such as by conveyor or by automatic guided vehicles. Be sure, however, that there's a sufficiently steady level of crossdocked items to justify these equipment investments before making your spending decision.
Well-equipped docks will not only help ensure safety but improve productivity for crossdocking and other, flow-thru process or receiving steps. Consider installing a total dock systems package at each dock door. That package includes a vehicle restraint, a dock leveler, and a "stop/go" communications system at each position. Additionally, you may want an impact barrier or gate to help prevent accidental rolloff of a lift truck and its operator from the dock edge.
Flow-thru receiving
Crossdocking may or may not involve breaking down received pallet loads into new configurations of pallets and cases to be shipped. Crossdocked items "rest" within the plant or facility in time measured only in hours, moreover. And EDI transactions expedite the process.
Similarly, flow-thru practices support high-throughput manufacturing or distribution operations and have a strong EDI component to them. Flow-thru items, unlike crossdocked goods, however, may "reside" within a plant or warehouse for days, not just hours-but probably not for weeks or months.
Again, bar coding, RFDC, and WMS all help to track items destined for flow-thru receiving as they move into a staged or stored status. Pallet and carton flow racking will help make the putaway of these items far less of an "out of sight, out of mind" condition by mechanizing materials movement through the system.
Flow-thru operations tend also to have both a large-scale and a short-term staging nature to them. U.K. automaker Rover Group, for example, receives parts from a mix of suppliers at its Oxford plant. Those parts flow swiftly from a 200,000 sq ft logistics center to production, however. Computer simulation models helped optimize how materials would move in correct sequence to the line (graphic).
At times, highly specialized equipment expedites the flow-thru receiving process. Here's one way the concept works in U.S. manufacturing: After EDI communications, a major automaker in Detroit receives an order of seats.
Like just-in-time supply of components, these deliveries are within "windows" of time of several hours, no more, from the initial EDI contact. Building upon the JIT concept, moreover, each delivery is of in-line sequenced parts. Seat style and color, for example, are matched, item-by-item on the delivery, to the sequence of specific vehicles already set for assembly in the plant.
Seats positioned on special pallets will roll out of the supplier's delivery truck as a "slug" of items from a conveyorized bed within the truck's trailer. Across the dock interface there's more roller conveyor upon which the seat/pallet units will rest temporarily until further conveyance into assembly at the plant.
Arrange your docks for speedy recovery
Side-by-side receiving and shipping areas with a U-shaped inventory flow between them enhances crossdocking capability. This layout also increases flexibility to shift dock usage to either more receiving or more shipping as needs dictate. Site restrictions or other factors may require unloading and loading docks to be in either an L-shaped or an I-shaped flow pattern. In these instances takeaway conveyor at receiving and sortation at shipping are among ways to help speed the flow of goods through the warehouse.
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