Solving Replenishment Challenges

Physical books. Lots of them. And more new titles are added monthly, which results in more and more SKUs to inventory. In addition, Random House faces the same customer-service pressures as everyone else: smaller orders and more of them, leading to more split case picks. Because of the dynamisms of their business, Random House picklines are not fixed locations. Costs would be far too prohibitive to constantly manage the rearrangement as old titles drop to C movers and new titles are frequently introduced. Yet, many of these locations have volume enough that they need to be replenished from reserve.

Random House struggled with this challenge, made more di!cult by the fact that Area Replenishment in top-o” mode took far too long to run, rendering it just about useless. The antiquated Area Replenishment program hadn’t been rationalized for performance in many years. So, Random House could only run Area Replenishment for the faster-moving SKUs because the restocking of 80% of pick locations could not occur before orders were received, seriously slowing down the pick operation.

Until recently that is. Recognizing their problem, Random House called on DMLogic. After several brainstorming discussions, DMLogic was contracted to take on improving the performance of Area Replenishment. If this utility could run more quickly, Random House could minimize, and even eliminate, the need for Emergency Replenishment.

It was a workable plan. DMLogic consultants dove into the program and identified numerous areas that held the potential for improvement. By removing unnecessary routines and by tuning others, DMLogic consultants were able to drop the run time from six hours to just under one hour!

The result, Random House is now able to use Area Replenishment, allowing the operation to restock locations, while minimizing the need for Emergency Replens improving throughput. On top of that, since Area Replenishment uses some of the same routines that the MARC WMS incorporates into Putaway (i.e. genmove, findloc), finding the right putaway location is also faster for Random House.

With a deep understanding of how the system works, coupled with decades of experience solving similar problems, DMLogic is uniquely capable of making similar improvements for all customers running the MARC WMS. DMLogic’s goal is to provide optimal solutions for valued customers like Random House, and their booksellers and consumers.