School Health uses innovative labels

Founded in 1957, School Health Corp. is a leading national provider of supplies and services to health professionals in educational settings—from preschool to college. In all, the company offers more than 20,000 products, ranging from health supplies, sports medicine equipment and early childhood products, to physical education, recreation and special needs aids.

Due to School Health’s success and growth, the company outgrew its primary warehouse facility and committed to building a new, larger facility in suburban Chicago.

“While we are adept at warehouse operations and order fulfillment, our current team had never designed a warehouse from scratch before,” says Beth Reed, School Health’s project manager/training developer.

With this in mind, how could the company slot its product inventory for maximum efficiency and throughput? What is the best way to handle seasonal spikes in demand for certain products, which typically occur at the start of each new school year? And, how should it number and label its bins—for optimal performance with its existing warehouse management software?

To receive assistance with its warehouse location methodology and slotting plans, School Health worked with Alpine SupplyChain Solutions. The project’s goals included minimizing the time and distance required to replenish key products; reducing workers’ bend-and-reach requirements for placing and picking products; and organizing its inventory more efficiently, leading to greater throughput.

“In my role, I hadn’t previously spent a lot of time thinking about warehouse location address methodology,” Reed notes. “But working with Alpine made the entire project team appreciate the science involved in slotting our products.”

She continues, “An optimally slotted warehouse supports efficiency and profitability. Just as important, it also minimizes the time and effort involved in key tasks like product putaway, picking and order fulfillment, which our employees appreciate.”

At the same time School Health engaged Alpine SupplyChain Solutions, it also reached out to a manufacturer of custom, variable-information bar code labels and asset tags.

“Since we were investing in doing things right in our new warehouse, we decided we should upgrade from in-house rack labels that wouldn’t perform to the requirements of our new environment,” Reed says.

Due to the seasonal velocity of some of their products, the team knew they needed flexibility in how rack slots were labeled. Magnet-backed labels were an option, but they can occasionally be knocked to the ground from daily encounters with forklifts and other traffic.

“[The bar code label and asset tag manufacturer] did a site visit and showed us a removable label, Clean Release. We immediately knew it was the perfect solution for our flexibility needs,” Reed says.

Clean Release features an adhesive that makes these labels fully removable and repositionable—without any scraping or leftover residue, yet they can also remain fully in place for years at a time.

“Now we can easily adjust and move our location labels to match our slotting strategy,” Reed adds. “As an added bonus, [the manufacturer] was able to match our corporate color, so our rack labels are a colorful extension of our corporate brand.”

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