This Month in Modern: Everest spice company takes one huge step forward

Over the years, some of the more eye-opening lessons in innovation I’ve witnessed came while visiting facilities in Europe. Due to limited space and daunting labor regulations, the Europeans have always had to squeeze the most out of every square inch of their facilities, often forcing them to ride on the cutting edge of systems innovation as a tactic for survival.

In facing those challenges head on, many of these European operations work hand-in-hand with vendors, turning working distribution floors into beta sites—and, in turn, fueling many of the latest innovations we’re seeing on trade show floors today. These unique economic, demographic and geographic challenges continue to yield solutions we may have never seen otherwise in the United States.

This month in Modern, executive editor Bob Trebilcock offers us the first in a series of three articles on distribution center operations around the world, including visits to India, South America and Europe. “Think of it as the National Geographic approach to materials handling,” he says. The idea is to step back and look at how these diverse environments shape the way managers are applying materials handling solutions, allowing us to draw some parallels to our own operations.

Beginning on page 16, Trebilcock starts our journey with a look into how India’s largest producer of spices, Everest Spice, took the leap from labor-intensive, manual processes into automation when it built a new factory and distribution center outside of Mumbai. The engine behind the project is two automated storage and retrieval systems (AS/RS) and an automatic transfer car. One AS/RS handles raw materials for the production line, while the other is dedicated to finished goods storage.

“Interviewing Rajiv Shah from Everest Spice and Daifuku’s Asim Behera, I was struck by the differences and similarities between distribution in North America and India,” says Trebilcock. “On the one hand, India is behind the times. For example, there’s no such thing as a standard pallet and logistics is rudimentary and expensive under the best circumstances. At the same time, even in India, finding skilled labor willing to work in a DC is becoming an extraordinary challenge. And, of course, quality and customer service count more than ever.”

As Trebilcock reports, there’s a generation of young business owners like Rajiv who are determined to bring best practices from other parts of the world to their businesses, such as automated AS/RS, warehouse management systems and automatic identification. And for Everest, that determination is paying off in massive productivity gains.

“Before making the move to the new plant and the AS/RS systems, Rajiv tells me the productivity was roughly about 160 units per day per person,” says Trebilcock. “In the new plant, the productivity has gone up to 600 units per day. It’s a huge leap, and one that was exciting to learn about.”