Case Study: Customer Centric Turnaround – Supply Chain

• The Case: Wholesale distributor with established presence in over 110 countries looks for process improvement and enterprise cost reduction opportunities.
  
  
• The Problem Statement: This wholesale distributor is faced with the challenge to deliver orders to its business clients with minimal delay, as its clients are retail stores with strict commitments to their consumers. The established operating model requires client’s operating hours to cover retail business hours on both Atlantic and Pacific coasts, hence leading to increased operating costs associated with a standard business day of 14 hours. Furthermore, despite all the client’s efforts to ship on time, orders are delayed between order entry and delivery, and the next day guarantee happens in less than 45% of orders, leading to increasingly important losses in sales revenue.
  
  
• The Fix: A root cause analysis of the failures, a VOC analysis and a process mapping exercise led to the following recommendations:
  
  
  • Phase 1A - replace main order capture channel (phone / fax) with Internet-based technologies (email, web order form)
  • Phase 1B - reduce operating hours in both order entry and shipping departments, while reallocating workforce resources between early am to mid-afternoon, thus ensuring the bulk of the orders are entered in the system before the courier’s cut-off pick up time for next day guarantee.
  • Phase 2 – upgrade current systems to a modern CRM system (Oracle’s PeopleSoft Enterprise), able to capture web based orders and automatically queue them for picking, packing and shipping.
  • Phase 3 – implement ASRS (automatic storage and retrieval system)
  
  
  

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