Richard Mini likes to hit the hot spots on a regular basis — the hot spots, that is, of the distribution center of Branford, CT-based signage and safety products cataloger Seton Identification Products.
As distribution supervisor, Mini oversees Seton’s 50,000-sq.-ft. fulfillment facility. Seton is a division of Milwaukee-based Brady Corp., a $591.5 million manufacturer/marketer of industrial identification supplies. It carries some 50,000 SKUs of such items as security padlocks, vinyl signs declaring “Danger High Voltage,” asset ID tags, and industrial bar code labels.
What’s it really like to be the boss at a distribution center that ships about 1,200 packages a day? To find out, Catalog Age spent a day in late September tailing Mini at his Seton stomping grounds.
8 a.m. Like most operations bosses, Mini begins his day checking up on everything that was supposed to be completed the day before. That involves making the rounds through Seton’s crisply air-conditioned and fluorescent-lit distribution center. Like the zippy European car of the same name, Mini travels at a brisk clip. In fact, the first test for job applicants is how well they can keep up with Mini’s pace walking from the lobby to his office.
The first stop this morning is the warehouse’s mezzanine, where Mini checks a bin designated for “problem” pick tickets, representing items that are out of stock or cannot be found. Today only a few are left behind. Mini or distribution shift coordinator and “lead guy” Vincent Cosenza will follow up on the orders once the 16 picker/packers, who work from 10:30 a.m. to 7 p.m., arrive. Three receivers come in between 8:30 a.m. and 9:30 a.m. to process incoming freight from vendors, and the cycle counter comes in at 6 a.m. to start counting inventory before any of the receiving or picking activity begins.
In the hours before the picker/packers arrive, few sounds are heard above the clank-clank of machinery, the thumping of boxes as they are placed on the ground, and the sawing sounds of Exacto knives, and the ripping of tape as the receivers open packages. Only occasionally do the receivers yell a question at one another over the din.
Back on the first floor, Mini passes the returns area. Although Seton usually processes returns as soon as they come in, this morning about 25 packages sit in the area. The worker who normally handles returns had been enlisted the day before to pitch in as a picker. The company is short three pickers, who left their jobs in August. Says Mini: “We did not have any turnover for over a year until we experienced three people leaving all within a three-week period.”
9:15 a.m. Mini is back in his office, which is fronted by glass windows lacking curtains or blinds. From his desk he can see the warehouse floor. Workers move back and forth from the storage areas pushing dollies loaded with boxes. Once the pickers are in, Mini says, he’ll see whether the 13 permanent and three temporary workers can be shifted around to address the returned packages before the end of the day.
Mini usually has around 50 e-mails waiting for him each morning. As he logs on to his computer, he says that he is waiting to hear back from the 14 other members of the parent company’s logistics council. Brady’s other divisions include Buffalo, NY-based EMED and Milwaukee-based Prinzing Enterprises, and operations managers from those companies are on the council along with representatives from Brady’s European and Asian operations.
One of the council’s goals is to find the most cost-effective means of shipping packages. Mini says that Brady isn’t using the volume of packages it ships as a whole — 1 million a year in North America — as leverage in the negotiation process with carriers such as United Parcel Service and Yellow Transportation. Seton ships 95% of its packages, which usually weigh around 8 lbs., via UPS and the remainder via Yellow. “That’s my goal: to use one carrier across the company,” Mini says. He hopes Brady will be able to collectively bargain with carriers within a few years.
Mini spends much of the next hour answering e-mails, most of them from employees with questions. One worker is unable to get the company’s software, purchased in 2001 from Walldorf, Germany-based SAP, to generate a pick ticket. It turns out that the employee had entered information incorrectly for a drop-shipped item that needs to be returned to the vendor.
9:30 a.m. Taking another tour of his domain, Mini arrives at the receiving area as the UPS deliveryman is pulling up to the loading dock. After exchanging pleasantries, Mini lets the driver, whom he has never met before, know that he is 45 minutes late. “That puts us behind the eight ball,” he says curtly, but without raising his voice, as he walks away. Seton, which typically receives 150-200 vendor packages per UPS delivery, has an agreement with the carrier to receive the goods promptly at 8:45 a.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Back at his office, Mini calls his UPS contact to inform him of his dissatisfaction. After hanging up, Mini elaborates on his annoyance, saying his workers hold up their half of the pickup time agreement: “We have to have our packages ready to go at 7 [p.m.], so they have to reciprocate.”
10 a.m. One of Mini’s bosses, plant manager Jim Lampert, pops his head into the office doorway to relay some good news: Each member of the distribution team will each receive an additional $500 bonus in his next paycheck, on top of his regular end-of-year bonus, as a reward for superior performance.
“We had a great August,” Mini enthuses. Sales that month were 6.4% higher than projected, yet operating expenses came in $30,000 under budget. Letters from the company announcing the success will be delivered to the pickers during the 10:30 “morning huddle,” a meeting when worker attendance is taken and Cosenza goes over each day’s goals as well as any problems that need to be discussed.
10:15 Mini makes yet another sweep of the first floor of the distribution center, passing pickers in their “uniform” of jeans and T-shirts. Seton, explains Mini, prides itself on encouraging a relaxed, comfortable work environment. Rock music can be heard emanating from one worker’s area. Another employee has decorated his light table — a type of worktable that is lit from within — with magazine cutouts of celebrities such as Beyonce Knowles.
10:30 a.m. Mini strides to the morning huddle, which takes place in the center of the first floor of the distribution center. Cosenza, a man of medium height and build with dark blond hair, begins by pointing out that the warehouse floor is littered with more than the usual smattering of empty boxes, stray skids, and discarded strips of packing tape. “We need to talk about how dirty this place is,” says Cosenza. “I want people to take an hour to clean up everything.” He reminds them that a tidy warehouse is a safe warehouse and that safety is one of their “smart goals” and determining factors in the size of their bonuses. Workers are eligible for a bigger yearly merit increase if they reach all or most of their smart goals.
After the scolding, Cosenza hands out the letters with news of their bonuses to each of the employees, who smile and chat quietly among themselves. Mini reads their letter aloud: “…for the efforts that contributed to a turnaround of the business last year, and looking forward to continuing that success next year.”
10:45 a.m. Mini returns to his office to interview a candidate to fill one of the vacant picking positions. The applicant has been with Seton for 21 months as a temp in the manufacturing department and wants to make the switch to a permanent position in distribution. It appears that the worker will fit in well in the warehouse; he has the high energy and dependability that Mini looks for. “He seems like he would be somebody that would be loyal to the company,” Mini says.
Mini can be a tough customer when it comes to hiring. When the Waterbury, CT, native assumed the helm of Seton’s DC eight years ago, “a lot of fat was trimmed down,” he says of the unsatisfactory employees he gradually eliminated from the payrolls. “I set productivity and quality standards and hold them accountable, and if they don’t make it, I get rid of them. The big thing was holding them accountable.”
Mini assesses workers by metrics such as pick accuracy. Each worker has to log in to the company’s intranet before he can get to work, and his user ID appears on every pick ticket and parcel manifest he handles. The company’s overall pick accuracy average is 99.6%, or only four errors for every 1,000 lines picked. The average order contains two lines. An average of 15-30 orders are returned daily.
Seton employs no dedicated packers. The same worker who picks an order packs up the box for distribution. The system encourages responsibility, says Mini, because the one individual can be held accountable for an order from the beginning to the end of the fulfillment process. “We tried to separate out the functions of picking and packing. It didn’t increase accuracy, but it increased staff,” Mini says. “For every picker we needed double the packers” in order to avoid bottlenecks at the packing station.
11:30 a.m. Before heading to lunch in the company cafeteria, Mini checks his e-mail again. A call center rep wants to know why an order that a customer asked her about the previous day hasn’t been fulfilled. Mini checks the computer file that handles credit holds and finds that the order could not be shipped because the customer’s credit is in doubt. Either the authenticity of the customer’s credit card is suspect or the customer doesn’t have enough credit to make a purchase.
Yet another e-mail is from the company’s facility safety administrator, who needs an updated list of the distribution center’s emergency evacuation plan, including an alternate emergency captain who will be able to lead the workers out of the building if one of the other captains is not there. Mini offers to serve as alternate if necessary but suggests that a worker who regularly stays until the facility closes at 7 p.m. might be a better choice.
On his way to lunch Mini makes another sweep of the mezzanine, where he finds two new orders that are unable to be filled because the inventory cannot be located or the computer has listed the items on backorder. Sometimes, says Mini, workers input merchandise information incorrectly, miscounting the number of products in stock, for instance, which then leads to an erroneous out-of-stock notice in the warehouse management component of SAP. On average, Seton has a 98% fill rate with no more than 2% of items on backorder. The company conducts an inventory cycle count four times a year for its best-selling products, such as pipe markers (used to make notations on pipes) and as infrequently as once a year for less popular offerings, such as its warehouse mirrors.
Although Mini brought his lunch from home — a macaroni-and-beef dish — he eats in the cafeteria rather than at his desk. “I always like to get away from my desk, even if it’s only for 15 minutes,” he says. He also likes to visit with the autistic part-time workers brought to Seton by Benhaven, a New Haven, CT-based nonprofit agency for the developmentally disabled. The company has employed Benhaven workers for the past 14 years. Some days Mini will also play a game of backgammon with a friend at the company “to take the edge off the day,” but not today.
12:15 p.m. Time to catch a second wind, as the majority of the company’s orders come in after 2 p.m. Mini says the company receives 2,000 customer calls a day.
1:30 p.m. Checking up on the mezzanine again, Mini finds the “problem” pick tickets starting to accumulate. There are now at least four waiting to be resolved. One, a ticket to an order for “Wet Floor” signs, can’t be fulfilled because the inventory cannot be found. “The computer says we have eight, but the picker only found four,” says Mini. He goes to the racks himself in search of the missing signs and finds a box of them hidden behind another box.
3:30 p.m. Mini checks in at his office again, to see if the weekly returns report has arrived. It has: 70 returns came in last week. “This is much worse than I expected,” says Mini. “This is going to take me forever to research.” He will try to determine the cause of each and every return. He posits that the three temps who have been filling in for the past few weeks have caused the returns to skyrocket, their inexperience leading to picking mistakes.
“I’m going to have to meet with each of the pickers to stem the tide,” Mini says. He may also start doing more random checks of orders before they go out the door. “We can’t afford to be lackadaisical.”
5:45 p.m. Catalog Age is ready to call it quits for the day, but Mini will be here for nearly another hour researching the returns problem. He’ll end up discovering that most of the mistakes can be traced back to one of the temporary pickers, whom he’ll replace as soon as possible. “What we learned from this is we need to screen temps just as we do regular candidates interviewing for permanent positions.”
Seton Identification Products
Parent company: $591.5 million Brady Corp.
Product line: signage and safety products
Based: Branford, CT
Number of employees: 260
Average order size: $240 (per data card)
Size of distribution center: 50,000 sq. ft.