Plant & Warehouse Consulting
If your warehouse or plant is struggling with low productivity, poor quality, not getting orders out on time, or too much inventory, Supply Velocity’s manufacturing and warehouse consulting services can be a solution. Our manufacturing and warehouse consulting methods are grounded in Lean Six Sigma and Supply Chain Management with a focus on implementation in warehousing, production, e-commerce fulfillment, inventory management and executive management.
The first step we recommend for turning around performance is to conduct an Assessment. Over the years, we have honed a comprehensive Plant and Warehouse Operations audit checklist to help us identify problems, their root cause and ways to overcome these problems. All great warehousing and manufacturing facilities follow common supply chain and operations management best practices, and will excel in the following seven performance areas:
- Labor productivity
- Capacity utilization
- Safety
- Customer Service
- Inventory turns
- Quality
- Employee engagement
Our goal is to help our plant and warehouse consulting services clients improve in these performance areas while creating a culture of continuous improvement.
Labor Productivity
All successful operations carefully manage and improve their labor productivity (also known as plant or warehouse operations efficiency). This is accomplished by optimizing the plant / warehouse layout to minimize material handling. In addition, with the adoption of 5S Visual Management you will ensure employees are not wasting time looking around for information, materials or supplies. A common theme in manufacturing and warehousing is the advent of e-commerce. Facilities that previously moved pallets of material are finding themselves picking, packing and shipping e-commerce orders. This puts great pressure on labor productivity making a streamlined plant and warehouse layout, and visually organized workplace even more important.
Capacity Utilization
High warehouse design and manufacturing capacity utilization is the key to achieving high return on assets and internal supply chain and operations excellence. Utilization is measured using operating equipment efficiency or OEE. The OEE calculation is based on the actual units successfully processed divided by the total product that can be produced in the facility, based on standard cycle time and a 24 hour a day, 7 day a week, 52 week a year schedule. Often when OEE is measured, managers find that they are using only a small percentage of their capacity. Utilization is improved through the use of Quickchangeover (supported by 5S visual management) and Total Productive Maintenance to minimize downtime on their assets (machines, trucks, forklifts, etcetera).
Safety
Safety is not only important legally and morally, it is an enabler of improving capacity utilization and labor productivity. Numerous studies of factories and warehouses have demonstrated that the safest way of doing work is actually the most productive. Great warehouse and plant operations work on improving behaviors and equipment to reduce the potential for injuries. This involves equipment operation, material handling and plant / warehouse layout. Like capacity utilization, 5S Visual Management supports safety by ensuring a well organized workplace. In recent years, as e-commerce becomes part of both plant and warehouse operations, companies, and even supply chains, that previously moved larger bulk product quantities such as pallet quantities, find themselves processing smaller package and consumer-orders from the same facility, creating additional safety issues that must be addressed before someone is hurt.
Customer Service
Providing great service to customers is always a top priority of supply chain and operations management. In warehousing this is measured by fill rate or service level (% of items shipped on time). At factories this is measured by on-time delivery. Customer Service is improved through inventory optimization and fast-turnaround manufacturing using kanban-flow methods. No supply chain can operate without placing customers and customer service high on their continuous improvement project list for long-term success.
Inventory Turns
Inventory is the second largest cost in every supply chain. Great operational companies carefully manage inventory, balancing the tradeoff of customer service (having inventory on-hand for customers) against cash flow required to store inventory. In addition, managing inventory, when e-commerce demand becomes part of your mix, means your inventory is the only buffer between your operation and the end-consumer. Optimal inventory levels should be based on forecasting and safety stock optimization. A streamlined warehouse layout can improve first-in-first-out inventory management while reducing shelf-life or warranty period waste.
Quality
Since the 1980s, when the Toyota Production System showed us that high quality can also mean low cost, companies have embraced the Quality Revolution. This is now the baseline requirement of all supply chains, including e-commerce, healthcare and retail operations. The most effective method of improving quality, or reducing mistakes and defects, is to reduce variation in your processes. Six Sigma is a set of graphical and statistical tools that help reduce variation and improve quality in processes. It can involve production process and warehouse design to promote operations practices that are mistake-proof.
Employee Engagement
A productive, high quality and high performing warehouse or factory will never be achieved if your people do not buy into your mission. The best way to get people excited is to involve them in your continuous improvement efforts. The Lean Method of rapid-improvement-events, or Kaizen, allows cross-functional teams of people who are close to the work make improvements in their work areas.
Start with an Assessment
With over 20 years’ experience as Manufacturing and Warehouse Consultants our clients benefit from an Assessment by the identification of all Warehousing and Manufacturing improvement opportunities. The Assessment provides a road map for organizational improvements that our clients can use on their own, or often we are asked to assist and facilitate the development and implementation of the strategy.
We will compare the best practices checklist against your plant and warehouse operations procedures to identify how we can improve productivity, capacity, customer-service (on-time-delivery and fill rate), quality, employee engagement and inventory management. The findings are turned into detailed project scopes-of-work that may include plant or warehouse layout, cellular line design, quick changeover, inventory optimization, streamlining information flows, 5S visual management and performance scorecards.
While the outcome of the Assessment is a detailed report, the focus of our consulting services is implementation. We want to quickly close performance gaps in a sustainable way, involving your team and educating them on the use of Warehousing and Plant Operations improvement tools so they can continue making improvements in the future.
The Assessment is a 2 – 4 day on-site process following the outline below. After the on-site portion, we write up a detailed report and present our findings to management.
Plant and Warehouse Operations Assessment Outline
- Interviews with key personnel
- Finance
- Sales
- Operations
- Supply Chain
- Purchasing
- Inventory management
- Logistics
- Engineering
- Customer Service
- Analysis of financial and operational data
- Facility tours
- Determine specific improvement projects, implementation priority and timing
- Calculate return on investment from implementation
- Nominate team members
More on Warehouse & Plant Operations
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“In thirty years of hiring consultants, Supply Velocity, Inc. was the first to tell me what they were going to do, set a price they stuck to and substantially exceed my expectations. I have recommended them to friends and acquaintances. They were true partners in assisting with the turnaround of an acquisition we had been struggling with for two years.Their math-based technology, solid down-to-earth facilitation skills, and positive, patient and enthusiastic attitude combined to make our implementation of Lean a very rewarding experience.
We increased our production by 50% in the first month of implementation and continue to see improvements. Improvements have not only been realized in productivity, but also in quality and morale. We have increased profitability by $2M on flat sales of $10M.
Based on Supply Velocity, Inc.’s integrity and our results, I will continue to refer them to others and utilize them in the future as we expand our company through acquisitions.”
“The role of the Erie Insurance Marketing Department has been evolving over the past several years – from a support role to a more critical role of driving growth in our organization. Because of our increased workload and desire to prioritize the most critical projects, we hired Supply Velocity to teach us the skills of Lean Six Sigma.Participants included the Promotions, Market Research and Agency Licensing sections of the Marketing Department.
We learned valuable tools to help us to prioritize based on the voice of the customer.
I firmly believe these skills made a difference in how we work every day. We are moving new projects forward, eliminating or changing ineffective processes, and we are a much stronger department. We continue to use the tools to help us with our highly-complex and time-consuming projects. Supply Velocity helped us to accomplish our goals.”
“Your process encourages this group to work together, better communicate and have fun doing it.”
“Supply Velocity has provided the technical expertise and political capital to move our project forward. They have just the right amount of push and the right amount of support. Supply Velocity has helped us make real changes to improve efficiencies in logistics without jeopardizing our performance. We’re happy and our customers are happy.”
“Many thanks to all three Supply Velocity presenters. I think you guys took a very difficult time for learning and capitalized on everyone’s time and training needs. I truly hope this helps your business as this was a considerable undertaking on the part of Supply Velocity. Outstanding!!”
“C&R was struggling with labor productivity. The construction crews were often missing materials that they needed to do their work. This caused significant idle time. Supply Velocity, Inc. and C&R used value stream mapping and visual management tools to make dramatic improvements in operations. Most importantly, two years later C&R is sustaining and improving on the implementation. C&R’s return on investment was 11:1. C&R had a record year last year in both sales and profits and would not have been able to pull it off without the changes Supply Velocity, Inc. helped us make.”
“Mitch Millstein and his team helped guide our shop fabrication division in the re-layout of our custom pipe and steel fabrication facility when we moved into a new building. It is not only the results but how he helped. We were involved in every step. I personally did time studies and was able to see the non-value added steps required to manufacture in our old layout. When we created our new layout, everyone was involved, from the executive team to our direct labor force. With Mitch’s help we increased our throughput by a 3x multiple, while providing more competitive prices to our clients as a result of the efficiency improvements.This has enabled us to not only make more money but also to expand our commercial reach and serve more, and larger customers. I would recommend Supply Velocity to any company that wants to make improvement in supply chain and operations.”
“Myerson engaged Supply Velocity, specifically Ray Davis to visit our plant in Trinidad to conduct a two day assessment of our production procedures and provide us feedback on areas for improvement and where applicable, areas for future analysis.Put simply, we got everything we paid for and in addition to more in depth analysis, we got specific tasks that were immediately actionable. Our local management team found Ray to be engaging, highly credible and insightful based on his wide experience. In other words the cultural differences and lack of specific industry knowledge weren’t impediments to things we could implement immediately and on our own. In a nutshell it was money well spent and will pay itself back many times over.”
“Anheuser-Busch Precision Printing had been implementing Lean Operations on our own for the past two years. We needed to move faster and partnered with Supply Velocity, Inc. Through Supply Velocity, Inc.’s mathematical workflow balancing and visual management tools, dramatic improvements were achieved. The entire converting operation was rearranged based on Lean principles. The result is a 20.6% productivity improvement, enabling us to operate with 23 fewer people in production.”
“We engaged with Supply Velocity to help us embed process improvement at all levels of the business. Our team learned from Mitch to let the data drive decisions, to use Lean tools to help us see our processes critically and objectively, and to create a control plan to manage all of the tasks that were the outcome of the data study.The project turned out to be very significant to the company and most importantly, our customers. We reduced our customer wait times by 40%, and cut in half the labor cost to fulfill customer orders.
Some results are not able to be measured. However, as a result of this project, we have started to build a Lean mindset and culture, which is part of our strategic mission to save our customers money. Supply Velocity has been a valued partner in this mission.”
“Supply Velocity is driving instrumental change in our inventory management processes. This is critical for us to be competitive in a supply chain environment with numerous disruptions. They are making change happen, which can be challenging in a 182 year old organization.”
“Supply Velocity created visibility within our Assurance Services Group… visibility of performance, Client-service, employee satisfaction and processing time. Using the Supply Velocity System, Audit Report Cycle time is down over 50%. We are using his strategies to create greater Client loyalty.”
“I am thrilled to provide this testimonial for Supply Velocity and their outstanding work in implementing Lean Warehouses and processes at Crescent Parts & Equipment through the COVID pandemic. With their data-first focus and Mitch’s exceptional coaching and experience, they transformed our business into a more supply chain-oriented organization, enabling us to grow while prioritizing employee safety and creating a better work environment. Supply Velocity’s expertise in Lean methodologies and their comprehensive evaluation of our customers have been instrumental in optimizing our operations and increasing customer satisfaction. We highly recommend Supply Velocity to any company seeking to implement Lean processes and enhance their supply chain efficiency.”
“In a time of volatile supply chain disruption, Supply Velocity is helping us develop Demand and Supply Planning processes to proactively tackle these new challenges. They are genuine partners, working with our team, facilitating and teaching.”
“We are pleased that Essex selected Supply Velocity, Inc. as our Lean Implementation Partner. At one facility, we have saved over $350,000 in work-in-process inventory, reduced throughput time from 2 weeks to minutes and increased inventory turns 3 to 8 times per year. All these results are in just 6 months. Our return of investment is very high.”
“In 2015 we began working with Dr. Mitch Millstein to optimize our inventory locations supporting e-commerce and in-store inventory needs. From this work we developed a new omni-channel warehousing and inventory plan that entirely redefined our approach to warehousing, inventory management, store distribution and fulfillment. As a result of the analyses by Dr. Millstein we have begun the move to an improved omni-channel design by reassigning MSAs to new warehouses, greater leveraging of in-store inventories to satisfy e-commerce demands, and exploring acquisitions of new warehousing space in strategic locations. We have already seen an improvement of $300,000 from both more efficient shipping strategies due to better inventory management.”
“Isolating a problem, finding short, and long term solutions with measurable results is what was promised and results is what was delivered by Supply Velocity. Upon launch of the Lean Six Sigma Selling System, we knew more about our customers, our products, and were able to create a solid plan to increase sales of our most profitable products. Within months of implementation, our booked sales jumped 60% and our most valued customers were getting direct, active, and calculable attention.”
“For several years we have worked with Supply Velocity to support us with their expertise on Lean Operations and Supply Chain Management. Supply Velocity has helped us implement Lean, improve our inventory systems, and educate our people. They are professionals who are always available to help us as needed.”
“Supply Velocity gave us the tools to analyze our business and processes based on the facts and numbers versus our perceptions. Our common quote was “Let the numbers lead us”. The key for our organization was how quickly we moved from classroom to actual project initiation. We were able to jump in, start using the tools and see a difference right away.
The get-into-action approach was good for our culture.”
“Supply Velocity’s Lean Six Sigma System has given us new tools to help improve our sales performance. We have learned new ways to analyze our business which makes problem solving more accurate and has made us better leaders.”
“We are using Supply Velocity’s Lean Six Sigma methods to analyze a variety of processes including rationalizing SKUs (stock-keeping-units). By using math to evaluate SKUs we took some of the emotion out of our decisions. We expect significant increases in sales and productivity from reducing poor performing SKUs.”
“In the spring of 2003, the St. Louis Area Chapter of the American Red Cross engaged Supply Velocity, Inc. to perform a study and make recommendations to streamline office processes, maximize cash flow in purchasing and warehousing and restructure and enhance our maintenance department. Supply Velocity, Inc.’s process was methodical, flexible, staff-oriented, inclusive and, above all, trackable.In the last six months, our Chapter has realized expense savings of over $380,000 annually, and significant improvement in intra-company service levels has been attained. Supply Velocity, Inc. will return to the Chapter periodically throughout the next 18 months to audit our newly implemented processes. We have been pleased with our results and Supply Velocity, Inc.’s professionalism.”
“Closure Medical recently completed a major reorganization in order to enhance our ability to rapidly create innovative medical devices. We hired Supply Velocity to help us map out the process and service flows of the new organization that would maximize our product development process (PDP). In four weeks, Supply Velocity helped us envision a new PDP structure, develop measures and accountability for each step, and gain consensus within the organization. Supply Velocity’s focus on speed and accountability helped us complete a critical project in a timely fashion.”
“Supply Velocity has helped Clean succeed in a number of ways. First, they provided the education that kicked off our Lean Process Improvement journey. They also facilitated a number of large supply chain and process improvement projects including: 1) building quality into our direct-labor productivity incentive program, 2) designing the layout of our garment warehouse, and 3) streamlining our route service process.We have integrated the methods that Supply Velocity taught us into our management and strategic planning. In the process our quality measurement has improved 22% from 2013 to 2015, we have reduced required annual labor by 2200 hours from the garment facility layout project and we’ve seen 50% decrease in error rate. Obviously the numbers speak for themselves, but just as important, Supply Velocity has been fun to work and have become true partners. They have “taught us how to fish” so our internal teams are able to implement change on their own, with the skills we learned from Supply Velocity. This relationship has been invaluable.”
“We used Supply Velocity on our Warehouse optimization project. One of the key characteristics of Supply Velocity is that they listened to our requirements and provided a clear path for our Warehouse processes using lean tools and our future sales growth as objectives.”
“Our experience with Supply Velocity was one of the best values we have ever had from a consulting project. Cyril Narishkin brought a structured lean methodology, invaluable experience and engaging facilitation skills to help us streamline a very complex and disjointed sales order process. Just as importantly, our team now has the knowledge and process competencies to address other business improvement opportunities going forward.”
“We used Supply Velocity to rethink our sales process. By analyzing the entire process we found wasted time in our Sales, Admin and Operations departments. Streamlining this process created extra time for each Sales Rep, allowing them to spend more time with Customers and increase the value we add. Gross profit margins are up 40%!We are now using Supply Velocity to help us rethink our entire Strategic Plan.”