The companies DYNAMIC FUTURE and SALSO have been “meeting” for a wide range of projects for almost 20 years. One of the most successful was the implementation of the WMS system at the company LYCKEBY CULINAR, which is engaged in the production and sale of ingredients for the food industry. DYNAMIC FUTURE Company Representative Jan Šlajer says: “We later followed up on the work carried out by SALSO with a dynamic simulation of storage space changes.” Questions are answered by Ivan Sluštík, the Managing Director of SALSO.
Let’s start briefly with what SALSO does.
Simply put – we provide customers with logistics solutions, and among other things, we also deal with information systems that support these solutions. We offer analysis of the current state, design, and project information solutions, and manage their implementation.
You consider the implementation of the WMS system at LYCKEBY CULINAR to be one of the most successful. Why?
Not only the most successful, but also the most extensive. It changed the processes in CULINAR to such an extent that it could focus on increasing production and significant growth with the original capacities. As the Managing Director told us after the WMS implementation: If we hadn’t implemented WMS, we wouldn’t be working today.
So, what did it involve?
On the basis of a logistics audit in 2000, we discovered, among other things, that although they have a fairly robust system for warehouse management, they nevertheless operate in pencil-and-paper mode. Although they somehow used a system, Axapta from Microsoft, in which they had a warehouse registered according to lots or the location of pallets, but the warehouse workers wrote this data on paper – either on delivery notes when they received the goods, or lists with where they store it, production or lot numbers, and so on. They took the papers to the office, there someone entered the data into the system, and when they were supposed to ship, the dispatcher looked up the stock levels and determined where the goods were to be taken from. The storekeeper received it on paper, and according to this he looked for the appropriate pallets.
When he didn’t find them where they were supposed to be, he noted it down again on a piece of paper, just like when he found them and made the transaction, and turned it in to the office.
What was your suggestion?
We suggested to the Managing Director that we have a system that would ensure the connection with their Axapta ERP system, where we would load purchase orders into our WMS from the point of view of warehouse receipts. The WMS would prepare the bulk receipts, and the warehouse worker would tag the pallets with barcode labels in our system. Then all they would have to do was to buy readers. The warehouse application within our WMS would allow them to beep the pallet and its location, and the data would be automatically sent to the ERP system.
So no more running with papers from the warehouse to the office and back again?
Exactly. The Managing Director liked the proposal. She saw that manual work would disappear, and that everything would be online in real time. And at the moment when it is to be unloaded, the dispatcher would no longer deal with it. From the superior ERP system, in this case Axapty, we read the sales orders thanks to the WMS, we propose the shipment with all the parameters, and plan it for the warehouseman so that he keeps everything necessary, and is as productive as possible – that is, he was able to remove everything from the order with one pass through the warehouse.
What was the result?
Of course, productivity increased, because they went from the “we can’t do anything” phase to the “everything is fine” phase. So, with WMS, we moved from the warehouse to the next area, that is, the picking of raw materials for production. It’s essentially the same principle. We take production orders from the superior ERP system and, as we plan the shipment, we plan the picking of the raw material for production. The warehousemen, in turn, see them in the readers, and proceed similarly to the warehouse.
Was that the end of it?
Far from it. Today, in addition to planning the raw materials, where we say what needs to be brought from the warehouse for today’s or tomorrow’s production, we also plan the production itself, that means batches for mixers. We register batches and send the data back to the ERP system. Workers use them to prepare consumption for production, costs, and so on.
Do you also record productivity?
Thanks to the MES system for managing production facilities, which CULINAR already had, we were able to start communicating with them. That is, the production plan “travels” electronically to the MES system, and it produces and returns the reality according to it. So, we also record the productivity and times of individual operations, and we also display all of these things online to manufacturers, on a large screen in production. They see what is being produced, what is currently being produced from the plan, what is the productivity, and so on. Of course, we also display warehouse occupancy.
What does the Managing Director of CULINAR see as the biggest benefit in the introduction of WMS?
Thanks to this, they have increased production in CULINAR, and manage it with the same number of people. Regardless of the fact that they get quality information, so their system of recording the entire process has improved dramatically and opened up space for increasing production, without the need to hire additional people.
And one more question: How did the employees accept the new way of working?
This is the alpha and omega of a successful project. By continuously educating and informing them, they took the implementation of WMS as a good step. The biggest Doubting Tomáš was the dispatcher, to whom the warehousemen used to bring records on paper. And he eventually became the biggest supporter and promoter of WMS.
The work of SALSO was then connected to DYNAMIC FUTURE…
Yes. After some time, the Managing Director decided on a major investment event, so she approached DYNAMIC FUTURE to jointly solve the increase in storage space and production capacity.
The “Dynamics” prepared proposals for changes, calculated capacities, and performed dynamic simulations of the proposed solutions.