|
|
|
|
"SHIPPING SYSTEMS SAVES $2 MILLION A YEAR"
The company provides third-party sortation, manifest, and distribution services for book publishers such as Grolier and McGraw-Hill. Included are clubs where members regularly receive books, CDs, tapes, or small collectibles. Their seasonal business builds upon the company’s already solid and growing base of year-around clients. As a result, this extra work pushes capabilities to the max. Business at QW picks up some 30% in August, says Mike Wernigk, warehousing supervisor. Throughput rates for a 2 shift/ day operation reach to current peak volume: 130,000 units. Sortation accuracy must be at 100%. New shipping software and automatic data capture (ADC) systems, together with high-speed tilt-tray sortation, help Quebecor World keep ahead of extra and expanding business, however. They also ensure a smooth flow of shipments, virtually error free. And that’s essential. Shipments must brighten the eyes of young readers, ages 1 to 5, with timely deliveries of Dr. Seuss classics such as The Cat in the Hat or Green Eggs and Ham and more recent titles from Disney book clubs and others. And Christmas tree ornaments must ship undamaged to members of another club. “Just as important, the systems are the keys to saving more than $2 million a year in postal and delivery service discounts for our customers,” explains John Gorman, vice president, corporate distribution. Quebecor World’s previous sorting and manifesting systems were insufficient to handle existing volumes, much less projected growth. Even at 3 shifts/ day, production had maxed out at 100,000 units a day by 1998. Manual sortation was a bottleneck, says Wernigk, moreover. Sortation accuracy was only as high as 96% in the past. Errors meant that a DC associate would have to do some “Gaylord diving,” recalls Mike Beneke, manager, application technology. To identify and fix an error, an associate had to dig down into the contents of tall gaylord containers to find mis-sorted items and pull them out. Finally, the prior manifesting system didn’t have the capability to support growth in services and addition of more over-the-road (OTR) carriers. But now the new automated receiving, inducting, and shipping manifest software has the desired capacity with near perfect data accuracy. Included are data capture activities that start in receiving and go through to final shipping. Bar code scanning and labeling as well as radio frequency data communications (RFDC) from hand-held terminals feed data into the system. This process keeps managers apprised at all times of the locations of products and their progress through final shipping. Pallet loads of incoming items are scanned, for example, so they can be verified for receipt and proper labeling. Some loads are scanned, then cross-docked with the software specifying a staging location. Next, small packaged items are pulled from the pallet loads and weighed, scanned, and finally conveyed into the tilt-tray sorter. Within the sorter, the induction software talks with sortation programmable controllers to direct each package to the appropriate divert point. Here an item drops down into an outbound gaylord or bin. Software sorting rules are based upon weight of package, destination zip code, carrier and delivery method, and any exception conditions. Packages that need to be manually handled due to height and/or weight restrictions or to exception conditions are hand-processed at exception stations. The tilt-tray system runs at rates that will sort 200-plus items or packages per minute into gaylords. After bar coding the filled gaylord by destination (a U.S. Postal Service bulk mail center, or BMC, in Dallas or Atlanta, for example) this container and others like it are loaded onto OTR trailers headed to USPS’ BMCs or to other bulk drop points and dispatch centers. “Our increased efficiency and capacity,” says Gorman, “open up new business opportunities for Quebecor World.” Besides the $2 million annual savings in bulk discounts, the DC operates with about a 5% cut in headcount. And currently it runs on two shifts, not three.
|
|
|
