Satellite Building Relocated

Due to the soft Arizona economy, our facility has relocated our furniture building into a much smaller space. In the distribution world, more space isn't always better than less space. In our case, we were able to make several improvements in our process through relocation.

First, we moved more product into our primary building. This translates to a higher percentage of orders being filled from our primary building and improves our productivity rates. We will spend less time off site at the satellite building and there will be less time spent driving between the two buildings because only one trip per shift will be required.

Second, the new building is much closer to our primary building. Our previous satellite building was 15 minutes away, so 30 minutes was spent daily driving for each trip. The new facility is 3 minutes away, so 6 minutes for each trip. Obviously, there is a gain of 24 minutes per trip, with two associates in the truck, for a gain of 0.8 labor hours per trip.

Couple those results with the reduction of one trip on average per night and the labor savings is 1.8 hours per day or just over 450 labor hours per year! That is equal to gaining a full time associate for 11 weeks at no cost! This is LEAN at its best, a true reduction of transportation waste!

Third, because we have much less space, we pay a lot less for that space. Our rent expense for off-site space will decline by nearly 80%, a very significant savings.

So we spend less money and increase warehouse productivity at the same time. These are the gains we look for all the time with LEAN production!