At some point in the evolution of the typical order fulfillment operation, no matter how well managed, small inefficiencies begin to creep-in. Like a thief in the night, they go unnoticed by busy managers, supervisors, and associates. Over time the accumulated affect degrades throughput capacity, lowers productivity and reduces margin. The idiom ‘death by a thousand cuts’ refers to anything that is a slow process in which a multitude of small, bad things happen which ultimately culminate in the demise of the operation.
Operations managers can guard against this type of tangential loss by keeping performance productivity records up-to-date and by implementing a continuous improvement program that is focused on core operations such as, Receiving, Putaway, Storage, Picking and Shipping. This is not to suggest that value added services (VAS) should be ignored. However, customer specific VAS is often a relatively short-term setup and closely supervised. Whereas, core operation are on-going and tend to be taken for granted.
Based on interviews with logistics executives and operations managers, we have assembled the following suggestion for preventing core operations from degrading:
|
