Growing health supplier configures new warehouse to maximize throughput

Founded in 1957, School Health Corp. is a national provider of supplies and services to health professionals in educational settings from pre-school to college. In configuring a new warehouse in suburban Chicago, School Health wanted to minimize the time and distance required to replenish key products, reduce workers’  bend-and-reach requirements for placing and picking products, and efficiently organize its inventory for greater throughput.

The company offers more than 20,000 products ranging from health supplies, sports medicine equipment and early child- hood products to physical education, recreation and special needs aids. Beth Reed, School Health’s project manager/training developer, remembers the range of considerations before designing the new warehouse.

“While we are adept at warehouse operations and order fulfillment, our current team had never designed a warehouse from scratch before,” Reed says. “It takes more than educated guesswork and spreadsheets to properly slot product inventory. We wanted to do things right from the start, so we soon recognized that we needed to bring in outside expertise.”

School Health worked with a consultancy (Alpine SupplyChain Solutions) to help with warehouse location methodology and slotting plans. A strategic partner (Optricity) provided software for warehousing optimization, including a tool used to analyze a variety of School Health’s unique factors like product dimensions, weight and velocity, pick paths, conveyors and materials handling equipment, pallet building, inventory seasonality requirements and more. “But this project made the entire team appreciate the science involved in slotting our products,” Reed noted. “An optimally slotted warehouse supports efficiency and profitability. Just as important, it also minimizes the time and effort involved in key tasks like product putaway, picking and order fulfillment, which our employees appreciate.”

At the same time, School Health also reached out to a labeling specialist (ID Label). “Since we were investing in doing things right in our new warehouse, we decided we should upgrade from in-house rack labels that wouldn’t perform to the requirements of our new environment,” Reed says.

Due to the seasonal velocity of some products, the team knew they needed flexibility in how rack slots were labeled. Magnet-backed labels were an option, but they can occasionally be knocked to the ground from daily encounters with forklifts and other traffic. The new labels feature an adhesive that makes labels fully removable and repositionable without any scraping or leftover residue, yet they can remain in place for years at a time.

“Now we can easily adjust and move our location labels to match our slotting strategy,” Reed said.