Waypost Case Study: Warehouse Consolidation Planning & Execution
A medical device company decided to consolidate their storage and shipping capabilities from five locations to one. The need for the consolidation was driven by a partial divestiture as well as opportunity for cost-savings of $300,000/year. The Company hired Waypost Advisors to Project Manage the detailed list of activities that needed to occur to successfully execute the transitions. The following sections detail the specific activities that occurred as part of this warehouse consolidation.
The scope of the consolidation included the following considerations:
- Coordinating physical movement of over 200,000 parts while minimizing disruption to daily operations & customers
- Parallel inventory planning to eliminate stockout risk due to the move
- Cut-over planning & testing to eliminate disruptions to customer shipments from the 3PL
- Stringent regulatory requirements and procedures
- Integrating product lines that had been acquired in previous years but never brought into the in-house customer service or accounts receivable functions
- Integrating legacy product lines into the existing SAP system
- System integration monitoring (or dual data maintenance) between client’s SAP/ECC and 3PL system
- Onboarding new employees to absorb the additional transactional work
- Process and RACI design and documentation
Waypost facilitated an in-depth, 4-week project planning analysis to understand all of the workstreams required to execute the project successful. Leveraging supply chain experience, Waypost was able to built-out a high-level project plan with estimated timelines within the first 2 weeks, and then spent another 2 weeks facilitating detailed project planning, identifying critical path items, performing stakeholder analysis, and designing KPI and status dashboards.
Waypost facilitated leadership and execution-level kick-off meetings, identified Steering Committee members, hosted weekly Steerco meetings, weekly project plan reviews with the execution team, and facilitated process-mapping and problem-solving discussions to overcome roadblocks. The Waypost Project Manager also provided additional analysis bandwidth to the team members and maintained the detailed project plan and project performance metrics over the 12-month project duration.
The project was completed in early 2022 before the ERP system cut-over deadline with only a few known customer impacts attributable to the warehouse migration and exceeding cost performance objectives.