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