In six months, we put in a whole new WMS. |
The existing system could tell you that it was going to send five cartons with 50 items, but it couldn't tell you which items would be in which carton. That may not be a big deal to a private company, but there is no 3PL in America that can operate that way. |
This was a great building with all of the latest materials handling systems you could ask for. But it didn't have a warehouse management system (WMS) that could meet the demands of our customers. |
We brought back as much of the old team as we could. They had to be retrained to work with a new WMS and to learn how the WMS interacts with all the materials handling equipment. |
We had to stop deliveries to those stores even though we had orders for replenishment. Because of the flexibility in our WMS, we were able to surgically shut them off in the system. As those stores reopened, we had the ability to set up waves by geographic area to get them back in stock when they were ready. |
We're at 40% of capacity right now. We measure our success and the success of the facility one customer and one order at a time. That way we make sure we are living up to what our customers expect and provide the service they need to service their customers. |
When we looked at the equipment, we realized we could replicate processing in different pieces of equipment. That allows us to move work around if one piece of equipment is overloaded. |