Strengthening your supply chain one link at a time.
Who doesn’t enjoy eating at their favorite restaurant, driving through their favorite fast-food restaurant, making a meal at home, or just snacking away on the couch. Without any research, I think it is safe to say that most everyone likes to eat!
In addition to logistics and systems studies, St. Onge Company supports getting food through the supply chain by assessing and designing food & beverage distribution centers. This blog shares insights on recent operational and automation trends.
Unloading & Receiving
Historically, the majority of inbound receipts were full pallets, but in recent years this has shifted to more partial pallet receipts. This creates additional handling and requires more space on the dock to stage trailer loads.
Many food companies use lumper services for unloading (and loading) as an approach to save truck drivers time and give them the ability to rest. A lumper service might be hired by the receiver or shipper and is a third-party provider / workers that help to unload (and load) the freight from a trailer.
A few ideas for improvement within Unloading / Receiving:
Put-away & Storage
The storage areas account for the majority of square footage within a typical food distribution facility. This likely includes Ambient, Cooler and Freezer storage rooms/areas. The utilization of this storage space is critical for all areas, but especially the Coolers and Freezer which have the highest operating costs.
The put-away process is integral to ensuring the highest utilization of the storage locations and overall warehouse space. The best strategy is a random storage philosophy within each of the storage temperatures, and with consideration of other product quality constraints.
Additional specific improvements for put-away and storage areas:
Order Picking
Customer order picking consumes the majority of labor cost within the warehouse. The most common conventional design is an order picker using a pallet rider, navigating the warehouse to pick cases from pallets stored in the lower pallet rack levels and decked positions onto a pallet. The need for picking units from a full case, called ’repack’ for many in the food industry, is a necessity for many food service distributors. With this requirements, a conventional approach is to use a pick cart, and/or tugger to pull multiple carts through the repack aisles.
The key factors to operating an efficient order picking process is to have the right pick media, best material handling equipment and quality product slotting. As business grows and expands with new product offerings, vendor packaging design changes, and/or velocity fluctuations, these factors must be designed with flexibility, expandability and be constantly evaluated.
Some tips for developing an efficient order picking operations, beyond the conventional strategies:
Loading & Delivery
Loading trailers has been a big topic in many of our recent food distribution projects. The trick is most of the creative loading ideas impact how orders are picked and delivered to customers. The loading concepts are really a focus on making the delivery to customers easier for drivers, and speeding-up the process.
Food retailer and restaurant service deliveries are either palletized or case delivered. Larger retailers have a single stop delivered on a full pallet, which is unloaded a regional DC, cross-docked location, and/or directly to the grocery store dock. While, most food service and restaurant customers are ordering less than pallet quantities.
The less than full pallet stops/order quantities require case handling during the delivery process using hand trucks. Most of the time, this is accomplished with picking multi-stops to a single pallet, and the driver manually identifying the cases per stop during the delivery process. Some companies direct the separation of stops onto the pallet into ‘sections’ to make this an easier process.
There is an interest in using quarter-pallets or returnable carts to keep smaller single stops together on a unit load, and reduce the handling of cases during the delivery process. This impacts how an order is picked, and possibly handled on the shipping dock. There are also potential trade-offs involving trailer cube utilization, which ‘drives’ most transportation managers. Some considerations when evaluating the loading and delivery strategy:
Improving operational efficiency is important within any facility but has a greater impact in cold storage warehouses. Cold storage space is more costly to operate, and uncomfortable to work in for long periods of time! The tips provided within this Blog may help you identify some improvements, and keep the food flowing to your customers!
—Norm Saenz, St. Onge Company