SUCCESS STORIES
A medical device company dedicated to advancing cancer diagnostics has dedicated the last 150+ years to tackling pathology challenges head on, from better slide production to worldleading Digital Pathology empowering AI development. Continuous improvement drives their team, so when the experts realized their US storage and distribution operations could not scale to meet their 10-year growth plan, the company partnered with Alpine Supply Chain Solutions to architect a plan.
The company’s growing line of pathology equipment includes tools for specimen preparation and processing including instruments and consumables, stainers and coverslippers, digital pathology and slide scanners, and more. To accommodate expansion, the organization determined they would need to more than double the size of their warehouse. But because building a new facility would be an enormous effort that took some time, the company decided to analyze their current operations before breaking ground.
Alpine performed a Best Practice Assessment (BPA), an exercise designed to help organizations uncover opportunities for improvement while benchmarking their operations against competitive, best-in-class operations. The focus of this BPA was to identify and quantify best practices that could be implemented in the company’s existing facility to make the current operations as efficient as possible.
One item the medical device manufacturer carries is wax, which had very different requirements from other components and consumables. In the end, it was decided that pallet flow storage would be best suited for the fast-moving heavy weight, lot-controlled, wax products, while small bin storage would be a better fit for smaller, slowing moving items. To create the flexibility to adapt to changing global markets, the wax pallet flow will be implemented as single select pallet rack. The means the facility can delay an investment in the more expensive pallet flow until the storage density is needed.
