Imperial Logistics
The Imperial Logistics warehouse in Clayville is an important place for the people of Gauteng. It is from there that many of the liquors and beers that we drink are distributed. At the moment, Imperial handle three liquor distribution principals.
Merging and splitting orders
The three order streams each come from separate ERP systems. These need to be merged into a single stream for routing and scheduling and then the routes are split into three again and sent back to the ERP systems. To do this, a pre-processor was created to merge the order streams and a post-processor splits the routes again and sends them back to each system.
Combined and separate picking slips
In order to make the picking operation as smooth as possible, FLO produces picking slips per route per principal so that each route can be completely picked with one visit to each SKU.
Nominated delivery days
One of the big challenges was making sure that each outlet is visited at the same time each week. The first problem was to make sure that outlets from the customer master files of the three principals correspond. There is no standardization of customer numbers, and the customer names will not necessarily or even usually match. For example, Makro Ultra Liquor Wadeville might also appear as Wadeville Macro, or Ultra Liquor Wadeville, or Makro Ultra and so on. A first work through the data identified about half of the corresponding outlets. To find the rest, we wrote a report that listed all outlets within a kilometer of each other and allowed the operator to link the customers from each principal to the same delivery point.
The second problem is to ensure that all orders for each outlet only come in on one day of the week. This involved an initial nominated delivery day study to allocate each outlet to a specific day. The idea, was that each principal would change delivery days to conform to these new nominated delivery days, but this has proved to be an ongoing challenge.
Results
The manager of the warehouse, Gerald Field, wrote "FLO solved the problem of combining orders from different principals to the same customer, both from a warehouse picking, as well as an optimal routing of the combined orders on the distribution side of the business. We were able to go live with the system on extremely tight deadlines".
