Focusing on First-Time Outsourcing Goals

Details

In a first-time outsourcing partnership, CJ Logistics worked with a Fortune 500 food company to transition three primary distribution centers. With expertise in migrating large-scale operations, CJ Logistics’ Business Process Integration approach ensured that systems, staff and processes were functional before cut-over.  Following a seamless transition from in-house to outsourced operations, CJ Logistics significantly improved the customer’s operational efficiency.

Situation

CJ Logistics recently partnered with a Fortune 500 Food company, a manufacturer of high-quality, branded shelf-stable foods, to transition and manage warehousing and distribution management services at their three primary distribution centers. Outsourcing their supply chain for the first time, the company awarded this business to CJ Logistics because of our track record of excellent service, our collaborative approach and their confidence in our ability to execute.

Solution

First, CJ Logistics developed a high-level design for the operation for pricing purposes. Next, we embarked on a detailed design phase that focused on daily transactional data sets, specific customer requirements, and a week-long on-site visit from our operations and engineering teams to confirm and observe transaction times. Finally, we refined ramp-up assumptions and created a detailed schedule defining the required staffing resources for start-up phases and beyond.

Using details of the business requirements and inventory profile analysis, we started detailed work on the IT integration, mapping and unit testing. We worked with our customer to define reporting requirements. Joint testing teams ensured the transition from company to company would be smooth. Our prioritization process ensured the most critical transactions and functionally were in order before the cutover, “go-live” weekend.

We developed a staffing and onboarding plan for staff positions ranging from management to hourly employees. During early implementation phases, we augmented staffing levels with CJ Logistics operations team members from other locations within our network to ensure adequate support and to infuse the operation with the CJ Logistics culture and values from the onset.

Result

CJ Logistics’ engineering expertise in facility layout design improved density by approximately 20%. Our engineers used this customer’s profile data to effectively zone product based on key factors such as velocity and stackability. CJ Logistics’ labor management system and layer pick capabilities improved the customer’s case throughput by three-to-four times the productivity of manually case picking these items. System and reporting improvements yielded increased supply chain visibility.