There are three key components to warehousing success and treating distribution as if it were process based manufacturing. The first of these –and probably the most important– is AWARENESS of the demand and supply in the warehouse. Each day the demand for shipments or receipts changes and new orders appear with short shipping windows. Just as in manufacturing, every day brings new opportunities to succeed or fail miserably. SSMG has a daily, early morning production meeting to allocate resources (people), equipment and supplies to the most important orders of the day. This understanding of the day’s tasks allows us to follow the work to completion and ensures that we are efficient and productive. Warehousing, even more so than manufacturing, has daily “emergency” situations for the various customers; recogntion of those situations makes them doable without the panic of late in the day “gotchas”. You can’t fix something you don’t know about.
This awareness meeting includes looking briefly at every order in the warehouse as well as their required dates and recognition of the effort required to meet those dates. Without this level of detail, you are guessing at what is needed and will probably underestimate the task. SSMG has had great success in meeting the requirements of our most demanding customers simply by being aware of the daily needs, the customer requirements and what it takes to accomplish the task.
