Same-Day SLAs: No Problem
Decorative and functional hardware manufacturers upgrade to meet ever-tightening SLAs
At a glance:
Challenge:
- Increased demand from customers
- Same-day SLAs
- 25% employee turnover rate
- Manual order allocation and picking
SOLUTION:
- 16 Chucks deployed in January 2021
Results:
- 2x pick rate improvement
- 3% employee turnover rate
- Automation in 5 of 6 steps in piece picking
Since 1948, Liberty Hardware has manufactured and distributed decorative and functional home decor products. Today they distribute their products to Home Centers, Mass-retail, E-business customers and consumers across North America. In 2019, Liberty experienced a spike in ecommerce sales that further increased in the years that followed. Along with increased order volume, their lead times shrank from 48 hours to 24 hours to same-day shipment.
For a company manually allocating and picking orders and experiencing a 25% turnover rate, maintaining the status quo became untenable. “We have cut offs at 12 o'clock and one o'clock and those orders have to ship the same day. We ship over 2000 orders in a shift,” explains Katie Young, Sr Manager of Operations at Liberty Hardware.
“We're saving 30 minutes of extra work that we used to do [separating order sheets]. 6RS automatically put them into order for us.
"[The team] understands it really quickly and that helps a lot to keep people here working.”
Martin Moreno, Team Lead
"6RS Rose to the Top"
Operations Leadership at Liberty Hardware started researching providers whose solution would not require infrastructure changes of the building, was user-friendly and that was flexible and scalable to enable them to meet today’s demand as well as whatever the future would bring. “Every time we answered, ‘what problem are we trying to solve?’ 6 River Systems was the company that rose to the top,” shared Miles Poole, VP of Operations and Planning. Liberty was impressed with 6 River Systems’ ability to manage five of the six steps their team defines in their order picking process.
THE SIX STEPS OF LIBERTY HARDWARE'S PICKING PROCESS
Results
Since implementing 6 River Systems, Liberty Hardware has improved training speed, training new hires in half an hour instead of a week or more. They doubled their pick rates and their employee turnover rate decreased from 25% to 3%. Additionally, the team is thrilled to have access to data visualization:
“This dashboard was the best thing that ever happened to us,” says Katie Young. “We’ve never had anything that would allow the people or management to be able to see what we were doing. I’ll be working on the dashboards and I’ll feel that somebody is behind me - it’s somebody looking to see what their numbers are.”
“This dashboard is the best thing that has ever happened to us.”
Katie Young, Sr Manager of Operations
