SUCCESS STORIES
When a Fortune 500 company who is the largest global animal health company began running out of space in their distribution center, they embarked on a mission to engineer their layout to accommodate growth, as well as improve pick effi ciency, decrease replenishments, and reduce labor. They called in Conveyor Solutions Inc. (CSI), a Systems in Motion company, that creates storage innovations, system integrations, conveyor system solutions and more. CSI then introduced the company to one of their partners, Alpine Supply Chain Solutions.
The manufacturer faced many challenges including needing growth plans for their new distribution center in Kansas City and not having enough pick locations in their current DC. Another challenge was that the pick and pass operation in their current DC allowed for only 1,500 orders per day out the door. They were also having to deal with the cooler and ambient zones within the DC, which was challenging because there were two diff erent pick zones in two diff erent areas that were not connected to one another.
With help from Alpine Chain Solutions and Conveyor Solutions, this Fortune 500 company was able to improve pick efficiency, decrease replenishments, reduce labor, and overall achieve what they were looking for in terms of their new DC.
In the end, Alpine Supply Chain Solutions helped the company reduce the overall labor for picking from 16 to 11 associates before realizing the slotting savings. The company went live in January 2024 and they are expected to save 12% of the baseline picking labor due to efficient slotting. Since Alpine took replenishment into account while slotting, the company is also expected to reduce their replenishment frequency by 45% due to slotting the high cubic movers in pallet locations, medium cubic movers in carton flow with multiple slots per SKU, and low cubic movers in carton flow with one slot per SKU.
