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Supply Chain Stand Up – MilliCare

PROBLEM / CHALLENGE

A franchise cleaning business was being carved out of a large chemical manufacturing business. Historically, they had used the supply chain of the parent company. They needed support in the short term to stand-up a supply chain to maintain product flow to their franchisees. We analyzed various options for the medium-term supply chain design.

LEAN ASSESSMENT

A Lean Assessment was conducted to understand the current situation and recommend an approach forward. The resulting recommendations were to build a short-term functional supply chain, then to determine the best long term supply chain strategy for the organization

Short Term: Supply Chain Standup

  • Developed Supply Chain Processes & Tools
    • Developed an order & inventory tracking model to support manual order processing and inventory management
    • Model provided procurement requirements to notify when product needs to be reordered
  • Hired and trained cross-functional employee: Customer Service, Procurement, Warehouse Support
    • Leveraging a temp agency, we interviewed, hired and trained an employee to fill the customer service and procurement role
    • This employee was responsible for taking customer orders, processing POs, tracking PO and receipts, and transportation support

Change Management

  • We were proactive in notify customers of the chemical order change
    • Franchises has historically had a portal for ordering chemicals
    • We adjusted the process to an excel and email-based ordering process in the short term.

Long Term Supply Chain Strategy Analysis

We followed a rigorous parallel process to evaluate our options with 3PLs and distributor concurrently

IMPLEMENTATION DETAILS:

  • We selected distribution as the best option to allow the business to focus on top line growth while ensuring their customers get their required products
  • We selected the top distributor based on the region, key franchisee input, and supplier engagement

DIFFICULTIES ENCOUNTERED:

  • The volume of sales did not support a private label program. The organization struggled with excess and obsolete inventory as a result
  • By combining volume with the distributor, we were able to make Private Label volumes viable

RESULTS

  • Maintained product flowing to their customers despite carve out
  • Eliminated the need for internal supply chain management team