As a part of our ongoing continuous improvement activities, Concord took the opportunity to re-layout our shipping warehouse. To better support our customer requirements, it was necessary to design a process that could provide our order pullers easy access to a continuous flow of products in an organized fashion.
Concord team members came up with the idea to install a power conveyor between two primary sets of gravity roller conveyors. All roller conveyors were assigned part numbers equaling three days’ worth of finished goods. The roller lanes were labeled with the appropriate part numbers both front and back to ensure ease of loading the racks and providing our order pullers with a safe, visual, and easy method to pull shipments with precisely what the customer requires for each pallet built. Totes of finished goods are pulled and distributed on the main power conveyor to a centralized pallet building station ensuring that each is manufactured to customer expectations.
This project allowed Concord to build all our customer orders on one shift vs. the three shifts used in the prior process.
Additional benefits to this project include:
- Significantly improved warehouse organization.
- Improved housekeeping and organization.
- A considerable reduction in mistakes made during the order pulling process.
It also created standardization for our order building, which enhanced our ability to continue improving the process.
