ning the order fulfillment process. Several processes had not been documented. This led to much confusion in each of the receiving processes.Implementation:Once all the planning had been completed, we found the actual implementation date fast approaching. I had made several trips to this warehouse at periodic intervals to monitor the progress and was told they were all set. It appeared that all bases had been covered. A physical inventory was conducted the day prior to the implementation. This was to ensure that accurate data was transferred over to the new system. This went smoothly and we felt confident in the inventory accuracy. The implementation was scheduled over a weekend and is a full of activities. The project manager pulled all inventory information out of SAP R/3. He then turned on the new system by moving the beta version into the live region. After that, a few tests were ran to determine if the program had transitioned correctly. So far so good. We then reloaded the inventory into the new system. The remainder of the day was spent validating the inventory to ensure it had been transferred without any discrepancies. Once this had been verified, selected orders were issued to warehouse personnel to pick, pack and stage and then processed as being shipped. The purpose was to actually test to ensure the system was working properly. Overall this stage was very successful and appeared to have gone smoothly with minimal problems.Post Implementation: On Monday, the first live day with the new system, we began to notice that the time required to process orders was very slow. Orders to be shipped began stacking up as we were able to process around 20 orders, though we usually see around 80 orders per day. This didn’t cause too much alarm as we expected a deterioration due to the learning curve of our employees. Most of the managers time was devoted to working with the order pickers making sure they underst...
