Question

Yankee Candle Company is a designer, manufacturer, wholesaler and retailer of scented candles. Yankee Candle is known as the world’s largest distributor of of scented candles and home fragrance products to retail stores. Yankee Candle is predicting spike in demand in time of Christmas between November up to December this year in conjunction with their year-end sales promotion. Recommend Yankee Candle Company strategies of picking operations that could be utilized within the warehouse to improve speed, accuracy and productivity significantly.

Answer 1

Recommendations for Yankee Candle Company strategies of picking operations that could be utilized within the warehouse to improve speed, accuracy and productivity significantly.

It has given that Yankee Candle Company is a designer, manufacturer, wholesaler and retailer of scented candles and world’s largest distributor of scented candles to various retail stores.

They are predicting spike in demand for candles during Christmas season, i.e. November to December and they are planning to increase promotional activities as part of year-end sales activities.

Two factors which will increase their demand are;

1- Seasonal demand because of festive season

2- Promotional activities as part of year-end sales activities.

As the company deals with all activities starting from design to selling of candles to retailers, in order to streamline their warehouse activities to improve the speed, accuracy and productivity, they have to consider many operational strategies. Few are listed below;

• Lean process adherence in warehouse.

Lean processes mainly targets at improving various aspects of operations activities starting from reducing turnaround time, handling time, picking and packing time etc.

Warehouse manager has to make sure that all the processes are streamlined in such a way that they should be able to minimize various bottlenecks in the process and remove all MUDAs.

Adoption of lean process in day to day business will help them to manage the inventory in an efficient manner starting from stock monitoring, inventory replenishment, communication with suppliers to provide raw materials in an efficient way such as JIT(Just in time) etc.

• Design the shop floor in accordance with various SKUs (Stock keeping unit).

It is always suggested that rather than mixing the locations of multiple SKUs, it is very efficient to maintain separate locations for each SKUs.

There may be different types of Candles based on various features and demand structure. Design separate locations for suck SKUs, so that the picking person in the warehouse can identify them easily

• Design the warehouse in Aisles, Rack, Shelf and Bin.

This is one of the common best practices in every warehouse to arrange the Warehouse based on various level of categories. It will always help the picking team to identify the exact location of each product and carry out picking process in an efficient and speedy way.

• Track the Inventory on hand inventory on order.

Yankee Candle Company has to make sure that they are always updating the on hand inventory of raw materials as well as finished goods, so that it will help them to replenish the inventory quickly using methods such as Vendor collaboration or Just in time.

They have to make sure that they are having a good equation between quantity on order and available quantity with them.

• Adoption of various picking strategies based on demand forecast.

There are various picking strategies related to warehouse management picking processes. If Yankee has the forecast of demand based on empirical data, they can adopt various picking strategies as per the demand. Few picking strategies are;

o Cluster picking

o Batch picking

o Zone picking etc.

• ERP implementation for warehouse management.

If Yankee doesn’t have an ERP to handle warehouse management system, they should consider implementing one. This will help the company to monitor, track, replenish, count and adjust inventory based on batches, locations, serial number etc. Company can rely on various system verifications rather than depending upon human interference in various activities. This will help to reduce human errors and reduction handling time and picking time.