understand how top management viewed the business going forward and, more importantly, what they expected from us,” he says.
The team also talked to marketing and sales people to understand
expectations from the customer perspective, and to operations people to understand their views on supply chain performance.
Regional managers and Finance also provided important input,”
Leung says.
This evaluation and analysis was done by a third party “to
make sure the outcome was very objective,” he says. A
Schick started a number of initiatives in different areas.
A key effort was to strengthen the demand planning
organization in all regions, including the recruitment of a
number of demand planners. “With their help, we refined
our demand planning processes, strengthened our fore-
casting protocol and began working more closely with
supply planners. On the supply side, the company allo-
cated dedicated resources to promote lean in all manufac-
turing facilities and it developed regional and global
processes for sales and operations planning.
In conjunction with all of these efforts, Schick launched a
company-wide implementation of Manugistics and SAP
around the world. This was not just an IT project, Leung
says. Teams covering all enterprise functions worked on the
implementation, developing new business processes in
many areas. “All these processes had to be reviewed and
signed off on by the different business functions, because at
the end of the day it would be these users who would be
responsible for results. We had to make sure that whatever
new business process or system that we implemented actu-
ally helped them achieve their goals,” he says. “The users’
buy-in and commitment to execute the newly developed
processes and protocols was very important to the success
of our project.”
Once established, ensuring that these new processes and
protocols were followed was not always easy. “With our
new processes, we obtained the beauty of responsiveness
and speed of action,” Leung says. “However, each individual
had to follow protocol carefully. We invested a lot of effort to
develop new processes, train people and refine processes again
and again.”
In one instance, Schick called all planners from all over the
world back to U.S., “locked them in a room and told them to resolve
all issues face-to-face,” Leung says. “In sum, the change manage-
ment was a bigger challenge than we had anticipated. We learned
by doing it.”
The end results have proved the value of this effort, Leung says.
“Customer service has improved a lot and we are maintaining it at a
very high level. Our systems and supply chain are more integrated.
We have more timely data and information so that we can make
decisions quicker. Our inventory is trending down significantly, and
revenue and profits are growing.”
How Driverless Forklifts Improve Warehouse
Productivity
Pick-n-Go technology from Kollmorgen, already widely used in
Europe, takes warehouse automation to a new level by enabling
existing forklifts to move to designated picking locations without a
driver. The warehouse worker spends more time on the floor actually picking orders, increasing productivity by 60 to 100 percent.
Benny Forsman, business unit manager at Pick-n-Go North
America, says that the driverless forklifts typically use a laser
attached to the top of the vehicle, which reads tape reflectors on
racks or walls. “These systems navigate within a tenth of an inch at
all times,” he says.
