ood the process. As the week went on, the number of orders waiting to be processed grew. We became more and more alarmed as we noticed that the number of orders processed each day was not increasing. We realized this was going to take a lot longer getting up to speed than we had anticipated. Our project manager was able to identify several minor issues and worked on correcting them and management continued to work with the order pickers.As the weeks went on, very little improvement was seen regarding the number of orders shipped each day. In addition, from the lack of having fully documented receiving processes, our receiving area was backing up and contributing to stock outs. By the third week, I decided to reallocate customer order volume from this facility. In all about 20% of this warehouse’s volume was transferred to another warehouse to help relieve some pressure. The warehouse had implemented mandatory overtime and employees were working almost 60 hours per week. In August, two major changes were made to the system. One involved an adjustment to the bin replenishment strategy. Up to this point, the WMS was directing replenishments as they were needed. By changing the setting to only allow replenishments at specified times of the day, this freed up valuable manpower to be allocated to order processing. The second change was actually a fix to the software. Sporadically, an order picker would get a system error which occurred when there was a slowdown in the interface exchange of information. Basically, one system would create a log jamb preventing additional transactions to be processed real time. When this happened, the order picker would have to log out of the scanner and log back in. By installing a faster server, we were able to eliminate this from happening. I was also called back to the warehouse during this time to document two separate receiving processes. By the end of August, significant gains ...
