Full visibility, better workflow and more efficient warehousing for £80k

“We’ve got better overall warehouse control and excellent visibility of deliveries as they’re despatched from the mill. Similar products are now put in the same block in the same shed which means faster lorry turnaround and a more efficient process. And lorry load accuracy has improved too,” says Mike Read, IT manager at Tullis Russell. And he points out that since implementing SSI’s warehouse management software (WMS), “We’ve got better distribution per aisle and easier logistics. We can actually see when the warehouse is filling up now.” Tullis Russell is a £130m turnover group headquartered in Fife. The mill there produces fine graphical and coated paper products. The company’s been using SSI’s Tropos ERP system since 1997, when it selected both Coda (financials) and Tropos as the foundations for its entire business. These systems (running across a 250-user wide area network) replaced its proprietary SFDC (shop floor data collection) software and bespoke ERP application. The firm’s strategy was a phased implementation of Tropos across the business. Phase One started in May 1998 and was completed in December that year. But before moving on to Phase Two, there were warehousing issues that needed addressing. Read: “We have two UK warehouses separate from our main mill in Fife. Although we despatch reels of paper direct from the mill, orders are also sent to the two warehouses by pallet for storage prior to despatch to the customer. “Our ‘old’, outdated warehousing system had to handle 15 to 18,000 tonnes of paper a year and 20,000 different rack locations. It was getting difficult and costly to manage,” adds Read. “Hence our decision to go with Tropos’ WMS module. “Most of the cost was justified as a Y2K offset, but the warehouse software was seen as a necessary step towards the Phase Two production stuff.” Read cites poor retrieval in the warehouse (caused partly by no validation of lorry loads sent there) and existing interface issues as other reasons for a WMS. The implementation began in April 1999 and was completed six months later. “The project team consisted of myself, an SSI representative, several key users and some internal IT support,” says Read. “The whole thing, from analysis and design through to building, test and implementation, cost us around £80k.” But he says the major concern for him was not the money, but other risk factors such as the possibility of loss of control during data cutover for the implementation. ”We got around this by heavy testing and a simulated data cutover process before going live,” he says. Embedded put-away rules “We’ve embedded put-away rules in Tropos. Some of these can be as simple as, ‘Fill the last four racks in each aisle first, then fill the high-rise racking next. But if it’s fast-moving stock, go to a different location in the warehouse; It’s not hugely complicated stuff.” Staff can now map location layouts by business or warehouse; set storage location capacity; apply business rules; create stock subroutines; and track lorry loads. “Based on pre-defined rules [product characteristics] Tropos decides where each pallet will be stored in the warehouse,” explains Read. “It creates pallet labels and all pallets now pass a fixed, single scanning terminal, which records the information direct into Tropos. 12 to 15 lorry loads a day go through this process.” Although Read doesn’t reveal actual ROI, he points to other, ‘softer’ benefits. “Better overall workflow: we re-engineered workflows between the end of the production line, warehousing and despatch. We’ve cut the headcount in the warehouse, the number of incorrect despatches are fewer and we’ve got better visibility of overmakes and undermakes.”