GM504 Unit 7 Scan-Confirmed Picking Proposal Example

Make the Record Change When the Stock Does: A Unit 7 Improvement Proposal for Scan-Confirmed Picking

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

GM504: Organizational Excellence and Change

Unit 7 Improvement Proposal

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

Ridgeway Building Supply, its staff, the vendor quotes and every figure are composite and illustrative; the methods and sources cited are real.

Summary

Ridgeway's wrong-item deliveries come mainly from bin records that no longer match what is in the bin. This proposal recommends three changes: a directed-moves module that requires yard staff to scan stock out of one bin and into another whenever they move it; pick confirmation that requires pickers to scan each item and rejects a barcode that does not match the ticket; and a cleanup of unit-of-measure errors in the item master for fasteners sold by the box. A six-week pilot in the main yard will test the package before it is extended to the branches. The predicted effect is a reduction of about 44 corrections a month, bringing the correction rate from 5.8 percent to about 4.0 percent.

Problem Statement

Stock moves in the yard are never recorded in the inventory system. As a result, 15.5 percent of audited bins hold something other than what the system lists, and 38 of the 52 wrong-item corrections in the baseline month came from such bins. Pickers follow the ticket to the bin the system names, and when that bin holds a similar product, the wrong item goes on the truck.

Three Alternatives

A second staging checker. One employee per shift reviews each staged load line by line before departure. This would catch most wrong items before delivery and could start next week. It costs about $42,000 a year in wages for two shifts. But it removes no cause. Errors would still be made and then caught, and the Unit 1 experience showed that a checker is the first person pulled away when volume rises. Shigeo Shingo distinguished judgment inspection, which finds defects after they occur, from source inspection, which prevents them at the point where they arise; a checker is judgment inspection (Shingo, 1986).

Retraining pickers. A refresher on careful picking and look-alike products would cost little and might reduce errors among new pickers. But the root cause analysis found that pickers followed the tickets correctly; the records were wrong. Retraining would ask pickers to second-guess the system, which slows picking and still depends on attention.

System-enforced scanning. Directed moves and pick confirmation change the process so that the record updates when stock moves and the system refuses a mismatched pick. This removes the cause of most wrong-item corrections and catches the remainder at the point of picking. It costs more at the start and takes several weeks to implement.

A checker finds the wrong underlayment after it is staged; a scan at the bin stops it from leaving the bin, and a scan at every move keeps the bin record true in the first place.

Weighing the Alternatives

Compared on cost, speed and whether each removes the cause or only catches its effects, the second checker is fastest but removes nothing, retraining is cheapest but misreads the cause, and scanning is the only option that addresses it. Deming warned that quality cannot be inspected into a product; it has to be built into the process that makes it (Deming, 1986). Scanning builds the check into the process.

The Recommended Package

Directed moves. The inventory system's directed-moves module lets a yard employee scan a product's barcode, scan the bin it is leaving and scan the bin it is entering, using the handheld scanners pickers already carry. The system updates the location immediately. Receiving crews will be required to record every move, including moves to overflow.

Pick confirmation. When a picker scans an item, the system checks it against the ticket. A mismatch triggers an alert, and the picker must scan the correct item before the line is marked picked. Overrides require the yard lead's code and are logged.

Item master cleanup. Fasteners are sold in boxes of 100, 250 and 1,000, and several items have the wrong unit of measure in the system, which causes short-quantity errors when a picker pulls one box of 100 for an order of 1,000. A one-time review of about 600 fastener items will correct units of measure.

Pilot Plan

The pilot runs for six weeks in the main yard, which handles about 60 percent of delivery orders. The first week is configuration and training. Weeks two through six run with full scanning. The yard operations manager owns the pilot, the inventory control lead owns the item master cleanup and the bin audit, and the project lead tracks the measures defined in Unit 5. The pilot succeeds if the main yard's wrong-item corrections fall by at least half and bin-location accuracy rises above 95 percent.

Predicted Effect

If scanning eliminates most corrections caused by mismatched bins, wrong-item corrections should fall from about 52 to about 16 a month, since some wrong items come from look-alike products in correct bins and from order-entry mistakes, which scanning cannot fix. The item master cleanup should reduce short-quantity corrections from about 41 to about 33. Together that is about 44 fewer corrections a month. The charter's goal of 3.5 percent would require further reductions in damage and missing add-ons, which this proposal does not address.

Why Start With the Largest Bar

Wrong items are not the only correction category, but they are the largest and the one with the clearest cause. Quality improvement works best when a team concentrates on the few categories that carry most of the problem and on causes it can verify, rather than spreading effort across every source of error at once (Juran & Godfrey, 1999). Damage in transit and missing add-ons have different causes, such as load securing and phone-order handling, and deserve their own projects once this one is stable. Combining them here would delay the pilot and make it harder to tell which change produced which result.

Risks

Pickers may find scanning slower at first. The pilot will measure pick times and adjust. Overrides could become routine if the yard lead approves them freely; the override log will be reviewed weekly. And directed moves depend on receiving crews scanning every move, which the control plan in Unit 9 must protect.

Conclusion

The proposal rejects a second checker because it catches errors without removing their cause. It recommends scan-confirmed moves and picks and an item master cleanup, tested in a six-week pilot with named owners. The predicted reduction of about 44 corrections a month addresses the largest category of errors at its source, and the cost and benefit analysis in Unit 8 tests whether it pays.

References

Deming, W. E. (1986). Out of the crisis. MIT Press.

Juran, J. M., & Godfrey, A. B. (Eds.). (1999). Juran's quality handbook (5th ed.). McGraw-Hill.

Shingo, S. (1986). Zero quality control: Source inspection and the poka-yoke system. Productivity Press.