Smart use of materials handling equipment to avoid non-value added labor, including this horizontal carousel that supplies parts to technicians on the assembly line, help MMH Productivity Award winner QSC pump up the volume.

hat does it take to achieve a high productivity operation? It may be easier than you think, says John Yacka, a systems designer with consulting company Gross & Associates. “Keep it simple” is his mantra for success.

“People get into trouble when they try to make things complicated,” says Yacka. “Yet, the biggest bang for the buck for many companies is proven, traditional equipment and systems and common sense strategies.”

Even something as simple as slotting stock by activity levels, or intermixing batch and strict orderpicking in a single operation, can have a dramatic effect on overall throughput and productivity. “Yet sometimes companies overlook simple opportunities in favor of more complex solutions that can be difficult to implement and challenging to manage,” says Yacka. “Not to mention more costly in the long run.”

One company who understands the common sense approach is QSC Audio, winner of this year’s Modern Materials Handling Productivity Award for Manufacturing Excellence. “One of the goals when we moved to our new operation was to eliminate our inventory and to reduce our cycle times drastically,” says Bob Miegs, QSC Audio director of operations. “One way we accomplished that was to recognize that since we build-to-order here, it’s the order that drives our production. The entire design is built upon that simple concept.”

“If you want high productivity, you have to tailor the design of the facility to the needs of the operation.” — System Designer John Yacka

So Miegs set out to design a streamlined assembly line and the mechanisms to deliver material to the line on demand. Innovations include a horizontal carousel that supplies parts to the production line and assembly pallets with integrated RF tags for tracking products as they move through the production process.

	Productivity Award winner Drugstore.com boosts productivity with strategies like voicedirected picking, used here for slow and medium moving stock.

“The value of the materials handling systems and equipment that we have here is not that they are high-tech or advanced technologies,” says Miegs. “What equipment like this does is allow my labor content to be strictly related to value-add activities. Through the use of technologies like carousels and RFID tags, operators don’t have to wait for materials, hunt for instructions, or move materials by hand. And if you can eliminate those activities, that is how you are going to get true productivity gains.”

Although experts may advise keeping things simple, one thing they are not advocating is a cookie cutter approach.

“I think the most important thing for people to remember is that absolutely nothing is cookie cutter when it comes to materials handling,” says Yacka. “If you want a high productivity operation, you have to tailor the design of the facility to the needs of the operation.”

That much is evident in looking at the five top-productivity operations featured in this edition of Design Plans & Ideas. For example, many of these facilities segregate staging, picking, and replenishment activities by the size, activity level, and other unique characteristics of their SKUs. “It’s pretty commonplace to see several, mini ‘warehouses’ within a warehouse,” says Yacka. “And they are all optimized to maximize the throughput and reduce the cost of handling that particular SKU.”

Yacka calls this process “segmenting the operation.” “What facility operators should strive to do is segment the work and design systems that can handle different buckets of the overall operation.”

And don’t underestimate the power of maintaining an appropriate work culture to achieve high productivity and performance. “I am a big believer in the empowerment of employees and in giving them the authority to make decisions on their own,” says Miegs. “It may be difficult at first for some managers, but the payoff is huge.”

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