Warehousing process improvement in juice manufacture

Abstract

This thesis studies the warehousing process of finished goods in juice manufacturer, hereinafter referred as ABC company. Although the business model is ‘Make-to-Order’ policy, there are still difficulties regarding warehousing process which comes from the requirement factors of its production and customer orders. The significant role of this warehouse is to assembly finished goods from various production batches according to each customer order. Each order instructions has to collect product from many production batches which came in the different time. It causes the inventory holding to wait for the completeness of each order. In the preliminary observation, the significant facing problem is the situation that was unable to load product out as scheduled due to the unready of order fulfilling step so that this is the focusing area in warehousing process improvement. The warehousing process analysis and the problem solving showed two significant root causes. Firstly, the warehouse is unorganised and leads to difficulty to control and investigate warehouse. Secondly, the warehousing process flow is inappropriate, which is emphasis only on the picking process while ignoring the role of inbound receiving. The pick- process took long time by searching and collecting product from all warehouse area as the inbound and storage are unconcern in the accessibility of the outbound. Moreover, The product profiling analysis showed that many flow lines act like a cross-docking flow, which means no storage activities and fast coming-in and going-out. The suitable warehousing improvement concept is the controlling strategy of activities category policy and also need to consider the cross-docking concept. In the warehousing improvement, warehousing plan was used as tool for controlling and monitoring the warehouse activities which is sensible pattern following the order characteristic and production plan. The proposal for warehousing improvement includes three designs. First, the design of planning flow process to define the cross-docking flow and the short-term product in advance. This algorithm purposes on controlling and monitoring warehouse by forming product profile at the inbound receiving stage especially the cross-docking line. Second, the warehousing flow is redesigned to be appropriate for the actual product and activities in warehouse and also the warehousing planning design. Finally, the warehouse layout is set by zoning warehousing activities for the ease of control and investigation. This warehousing improvement result shows that the percentage of order fulfilment process failure was reduced from 5.45% to 1.41% or about 74% improving. The percentage of failure is dramatically reducing to be 3.3% in first month from the average value of two previous months at 5.45%. After that, the failure is gradually reducing to be about 0-1.5% in the last researching period. Furthermore, the warehousing operation is easier to control and operate. Warehousing flow becomes smooth. The cross docking is identified and directly sent to picking at the beginning of inbound receiving stage. The activities zoning layout reduces time of searching process as the boundary guideline.