Issue 186 - Are Picking Bottlenecks Costing You $2,511 per Month?

In our last issue we talked about improving your workflow and cutting costs by focusing on bottleneck activities. This week we look at a very frequent bottleneck in the picking process. A bottleneck that, if you have it, slows production and allows errors in to make it out the door and to your customers.

Paul Hernandez-Cuebas

Thinking inside the Box - What is this costing me? The company we’ll be talking about today is a mid-sized broad-line distributor operating four full time delivery trucks. They deliver 30-40 orders per day. After receiving an order they generate a picking sheet, which goes in a pile to be sorted by the warehouse manager into routes. The routes are assigned to drivers who pick the orders, record the catch weights, and load the trucks. The warehouse manager reviews the catch weights and the orders before writing up an invoice and sending the driver out.

Looking at a visual workflow we quickly identify a flaw in the process.

Original Picking Workflow

Based on our visual diagram we see the manager is reportedly checking catch weights after the order has been palletized and loaded on the truck. There are only two ways he could be doing this, either he’s got the flexibility of a gymnast and works his way into every corner of the truck reading the catch weight labels, or he’s “eyeballing” the drivers worksheet hoping to catch obvious errors. We’re going to assume it’s the second.

IMPORTANT NOTE: We’re using the title Warehouse Manager in our example, even if this position is filled by the Owner you MUST look at the workflow in an objective manner. Being a company owner does not grant any additional psychic powers, if you are checking catch weights by feel, instinct, or any other euphemism that means guessing then you are losing money and disappointing customers as each catch weight error goes out the door.

Rearranging our steps to a more logical order we have the manager checking weights before the order is palletized when the catch weight labels are still easily viewed.

Revised Picking Workflow

Talking with the Warehouse Manager we hear that having the step where he check weights makes the driver wait and causes a backup that slows down the whole process preventing trucks from getting out on-time. The warehouse manager was un-officially working around this bottleneck by eyeballing weights after the truck was loaded.

Now that you have identified the activity creating the real bottleneck in your desired process you can apply one or more of these common Activity Improvement Techniques:

Add additional resources to increase capacity at the bottleneck: If the manager cannot keep up with the picking flow one option is to add another manager.
Improve the efficiency of the bottleneck: Is there any way to make the manager’s work faster/easier? Have the pickers arrange cases with weights faxing out, provide pick sheets with a second column for the manager to record weights, etc.
Move work away from bottleneck resources: Could someone else sort the Picking Sheets by Route freeing more of the managers time.
Increase availability of bottleneck resources: Is there anything that can be done to better schedule the manager’s time, shift changes or breaks?
Minimize non-value adding activities: Could any portion of the work flow be eliminated? Could we eliminate the driver recording weights in favor of having the manager be solely responsible?
Add automation or technical resources to increase capacity: Could an automated system, scale or bar code scanner be added to eliminate the bottleneck?

The owner of the company is going to have to get answers to some of the questions above before making a decision about how to move forward. Looking at our thinking inside the box however you can see how critical it is to have catch weight errors prevented, this is something you need to act on now.

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