SPOTLIGHT ON NCOF

Multichannel Merchant will be previewing the smartest practices and other need-to-know information from the 17th annual National Conference on Operations & Fulfillment (NCOF), which we copresent with the Direct Marketing Association. This year's NCOF will be held in Schaumburg, IL, from April 29 to May 2 (for details visit www.ncof.com).

This month, NCOF speaker Sam Flanders, president of Durham, NH-based Warehouse Management Consultants, talks about identifying challenges and opportunities in your distribution center.

If you are like most DC managers, you know that your operation has many challenges that your employees grapple with on regular basis. You may have grown to accept some of these problems, but you can break out of this “that's just the way it is” mode of thinking to identify, document, and prioritize challenges — and ultimately implement improvements.

The key to identifying challenges is to systematically and objectively observe your operation. For example, to identify packing challenges you should observe the pack area for one or two hours during a busy time. What activities could be improved? Do bottlenecks occur? Is equipment placed to make packing easy, or should it be rearranged? How easy is it to get packages sorted to a carrier bin? How much work does it take to get the packages to the truck?

As an observer, you may be locked in to a particular way of thinking and simply not realize that another alternative is possible. So you might consider using a new employee or perhaps even an outside resource to observe activities for you. A new resource will not be as willing to accept things as normal, especially if he is encouraged to find areas for improvement.

Once you collect all the data, organize and prioritize the information into an action plan. Pick something that will have a high payback but will be fairly easy to deploy. Knocking off an easy project will help you to build some momentum for more-difficult projects. Then you can prioritize and work on the rest of your list as time permits.