Business improvement techniques and change in the workplace

Executive Summary

This report research aims to propose and implement a new process of warehouse performance management to overcome the current limitations of the picking process, replenishment and inventory management process. The report is focused on understanding the relationship between inventory stock management and warehouse performance indicators.

This report is exploring a group of performance indicators, such as time, cost, productivity and quality.

Our long-term vision is to improve our warehouse stores management in order to have a warehouse inventory stock managed in the best efficient and productive way.

As a company we have growth internally in many different ways as we all witnessed and we think is our responsibility to continuously promote the improvement in all possible areas of our manufacturing process.

We aim to identify, analyse and implement a method of improvement and the result will based on benchmarking with other companies.

More success on implementing ideas will strongly set a culture of continuous improvement and it will place Design Plan as role model to follow in our stakeholder’s business group Fagerhult.

Long-term efficient and productive inventory stock control and management will save money and time, quality will improve, we will gain trust, confidence from our customers and we will really be promoting a long last high-quality products and service.

1.0 Introduction

Continuous improvement in the workplace is an approach to identify opportunities to improve and develop the business to meet goals, increase profits, reduce cost and enhance productivity. Adopting a program of continuous improvement in the workplace can bring new ideas to improve old ways of running the business. Continuous improvement in processes can help identity waste and inefficiency that will be removed in order to help team members productivity and performance. To encourage team members towards continuous improvement culture the leadership should be proactive to all suggestion, ideas and feedback. Team leaders should encourage and empower employees to make continuous improvement culture part of their daily work, offering help, support and resources in order to secure the culture.

Understanding the importance of continuous improvement culture is beneficial to promote action in changing processes for better, allocate resource efficiently and motivate everyone to get involved and act in the process of change.

Our business come to understand that the only way of improving processes is to try something new and to challenge staff to move beyond their comfort zone in order to achieve goals, performance and improve skills and knowledge.

This report focusses on organizing the inventory stock to maximize the usage of available space, efficient storage and picking and reducing the handling cost.

Currently walking from product to product to pick orders and replenishment is one of the most time-consuming activities of our staff in stores. Between 50% and 65% of this time for picking order process is spent on walking and the staff had to grow in number in order to keep up with customer demands.

Improving the efficiency in stores has come as need of change due to the new culture adopted to stay lean, growing customers order demands and improved productivity in other departments that are strongly linked to stores.

Most recently design team has managed to standardize some of our products with high demand and in this case some of the components are now obsolete and not suitable for use and others are fast moving then they used to be, but the current warehouse stock organization is not helping to improve productivity. Fast moving products are randomly placed in locations and not in close proximity to the picking face, obsolete stock occupies space that can be used for bulk stock and so we are struggling find space for this stock making replenishment more harder and time consuming. This way of managing inventory stock was working back in the old facility, we used to have a smaller building and also less customer orders that would allowed us to process them easier, but now, moving into this new facility with a wide space and possibility to improve is showing us that we need to look at product slotting. This is a process of organizing inventory stock to maximize the usage of available space and efficient picking and storage and it will allow to use less staff to pick more orders, reduce travel time and reduce cost on labour.