Answer Case study questions.

CASE STUDY:

The ambient warehouse manages various product ranges that are normally sold in a leading supermarket chain such as Coles or Woollies. The range of products managed in this ambient warehouse includes regular and decaffeinated coffee powder, tea bags, sugar, and long-life milk. The products are received in cartons shrink-wrapped on pallets. Generic pallets are received but all are breakbulk and reconsolidated as cross/mixed SKU pallets for deliveries to the supermarkets. There are three main types of storage in the warehouse item, case/carton, and pallet loads. There are three types of storage systems used in this warehouse modular shelves for items or piece SKUs, Gravity flow racks and Selective racking for SKUs unitized and packed in cases or cartons, and Selective racking for full generic pallet loads. There are three types of materials handling equipment used in this warehouse pallet jacks, powered pallet jacks and counterbalance forklift trucks.

QUESTIONS

1) There are several errors in the warehouse layout. Identify any four (4) critical errors and explain why you have considered them to critical errors.

2) Assuming you are the warehouses newly appointed warehouse manager, suggest how you will resolve each error identified in the previous question. Explain how each suggestion will resolve or ease the negative impacts on the operations of the warehouse.

3)A year after your suggestions have been implemented, a new Chief Technology Officer (CTO) was recruited to improve the warehouse operations via digital transformation. The CTO asks you to explore the use of collaborative robots (COBOTS) in the warehouse to improve productivity in the order picking process. Based on your research, explain any five (5) advantages of parts to picker strategy that are relevant to the case.

4)After the successful implementation of the COBOTS project, you were promoted to the position of Head of Supply Chain. Your Chief Operating Officer gives you your first project and that is to improve the companys inventory holding cost. Explain how minimizing occurrences of out of stocks and over stocking influence decisions on inventory management e.g. what, where, when, how much and how often to replenish stocks.

5)Six months into your new role as Head of Supply Chain, you received a please help message from the warehouse manager of your companys contracted warehouse. Order fulfillment performance of this warehouse is poor with only 60% accuracy. You visit the warehouse and observed that while their staff used scanners to scan barcodes of picking lists, the actual order picking and sortation are manually intensive i.e. excessive time is spent searching for items to be picked and when picked, they are brought to work stations near the packaging stations to be sorted into respective orders. Discuss any five (5) possible strategies on how you would improve the order picking process in this warehouse without changing their existing IT systems i.e. barcode and scanners.