Parcel - March/April 2009 - (Page 31) planning and communication are very important. One person or department may view a project as a success if the system is simply up and running, whereas another may define a successful project as being at 100% on day one. Improper Training Train early and train often! A lot of people forget exception training and training of ALL involved personnel, or they choose to train over go-live weekend, all which will cause failure. Make sure you have reports in place. Consider what kinds of information people will need to run their processes and jobs effectively. This includes things like Operational Training, IT Training/Troubleshooting, Exception Processing and Reporting Techniques. Inaccurate Item Analysis Be aware that item analysis is critical. How do you slot your product? It’s important to understand that you may have an “A” mover in an area that’s all pallet picks, but it may be a slow mover in your piece pick area. So, you may not want to put that “A” item in a fast-moving piece pick area. In addition, dimensional information is critical. Without having accurate dimensions in packing orders or in locating products, you may run into several different problems and many exceptions when you go live. The goal is to avoid exceptions due to bad data and only deal with exceptions based upon customer requirements, etc. Make sure you are ready when you go live with your inventory in the right zones. For example, the product needs to be in each case and/or pallet pick areas depending on order profiles. While it’s not always practical to do a complete physical inventory, if you can, the go-live goes much more quickly/easily if you do. If you don’t, you may encounter problems and financial concerns. Poor inventory accuracy at go-live can have a huge impact on the success of your implementation that snowballs. For example, if the WMS has a picker go to a location to pick 10 items, but there are only eight there, the picker may opt to pick eight from that location, and then two from an adjacent location without telling the system, further compounding the accuracy of the inventory. This may also cause morale issues as well, as already suspicious employees may find more reasons to dislike or distrust the system, when in reality it wasn’t the system’s fault in the first place. n Chris Werling is President of Cornerstone Solutions, an independent supply chain management consulting firm. This is an article condensed from a whitepaper, which can be found at www.cornerstones.com/site/resources/articles.html. MARCH 2009 | www.PARCELindustry.com 31 http://www.cornerstones.com/site/resources/articles.html http://www.afms.com http://www.afms.com http://www.PARCELindustry.com
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