The Progress Group : Cost Reduction

We recognize your organization is smart and capable; you find and pick the low hanging fruit every day. Thus if we are going to help you reduce costs further, we have to take a different tac. Our strength is going deep into an operation to find a great swath of small opportunities across the supply chain that are harder to uncover or may seem too costly for your organization to explore. But these small opportunities add up to noticeable savings!

We have been developing not-found-anywhere-else tools and capabilities to help firms reduce their warehouse costs, knowing full well that the economic expansion wouldn’t last forever…

Our approach begins much like any other firm or internal cost reduction team would start, i.e. with obtaining operational and cost information in the areas that matter most. What is different about our approach is the level of detail in this data. We don't use high level statistics. We want (where possible) transaction level information. The reason for this becomes apparent in what we do with the data.

Do you follow best practice?

We know to improve costs further than you have already requires more than higher resolution data. You need insight. We provide this in three ways. First we have a database of transaction-level process benchmarks (e.g. receiving cases, picking units, packing orders, etc) from a variety of past engagements that we can use to uncover where your fulfillment process is not in synch with best practice.

Benchmarking usually leaves a bad taste in the mouths of many because it is hard to get apples to apples comparisons. But at TPG we have detailed timestudies behind our benchmarks so we can adjust the #s to your reality to make valid apples-to-apples comparisons between operations that are similar but not exactly the same as yours.

You wont find these opportunities with Excel…

The second way in which we provide insight is we have the ability to analyze problems / opportunities with more than just Excel, the common tool of the ordinary logistics engineer or consultant.

Most of the large opportunities uncovered on our engagements are discovered through using our proprietary tools or writing programs to analyze the data in ways that are just not possible using Excel. This is best understood by an example.

At one consumer goods client, orders for retailers were filled through a pick & pass process where multiple pickers would touch an order in a bucket brigade fashion. Each picker would pick items for an order that were stored in his or her zone of the warehouse and then pass the order to the next picker in a different area of the warehouse.

We wrote a program to assess how often pickers were waiting around for another picker to finish an order and send it to them. The analysis showed that 22% of the time the pickers were in their zone but waiting on orders to arrive for them to process. Afterwards, we worked with the client to identify ways to add “filler work” in between orders to help increase the utilization of pickers by 15%, e.g. building boxes or picking single line orders. We would never have found this using Excel.

One other thing that helps… we know what we are doing.

Finally, while every firm will tell you this, we really know what we are doing. Our on site consultants have close to 20 years of experience around warehousing. We have people with very deep experience in direct to consumer, retail, consumer goods, wholesaling and spare parts.

But you have experienced people too! We welcome that and we want you to know we are very collaborative in our approach. When you combine the intimate knowledge of 30 to 40 operations that EACH of our consultants have with your staff’s detailed knowledge of your business, you find:

1.A fresh new perspective on your operation develops. We can answer “What do other companies in this situation do?

2.A catalyst for change emerges because we won’t let you dismiss what really is possible; if we have seen it work somewhere else we won’t let your staff leave it without a discussion

Don’t Listen to Our marketing Spin… Talk to Our customers!

The only thing that matters is the money we help you find. We know that. All of the above is just talk. To help prove we can deliver, we have provided the links below to case studies of past cost reduction work. Read it and then contact us at bstrahan@theprogressgroup.com 770-804-9920

30% Improvement in Picking at an Intimate apparel retailer

25% Labor Reduction at a B2C Uniform Company

15 to 20% Labor Reduction at a B2C Sporting Goods Company

20% Reduction in labor at a consumer goods company