Upon selecting SAP to be our new ERP, we decided after careful review to stay with the SAP Warehouse Management versus Extended Warehouse Management platform. Throughout our conversion, we kept our WM customization to a minimum by printing all sales orders for a distribution specialist to pick, pack, and complete. Eighteen months after our implementation, we decided to investigate the EWM functionality to see if it would allow us to eliminate the manual reliance of people and paper within our warehouse. While the EMW would definitely allow for this, it would also complicate other behind-the-scenes data tables and process compliance we were not able to comply with. Instead, we decided to push our WM platform to the “likeness” of an EWM without the “handcuffs” of an EWM.
We spent the next six to 12 months designing and implementing functionality in SAP WM to automatically have our batch system release sales orders to our various customer-demanded business rules. Before this, we had to execute over 20 different variants, multiple times per day through t-codes such as VL10C, VT04, and VL06P. Once the orders were released in the system, rather than printing all outputs, we designed two new t-codes to electronically organize, prioritize, and assign dock placement. The final piece of the customization would then allow us to place distribution specialists (pickers) into a queue where we would send the orders to. We can split the orders into multiple people picking, a single person picking, etc. These two customized enhancements allowed us to improve the following areas:
- Indirect clerical labor
- Quality on the orders and reduction in picking errors and missing errors
- Downtime and waiting on work
- Lead time to the customers
- Paper and label savings
The five-year savings of this project is over $5 million net of the investment along with improving quality from four sigma to five sigma and reducing overall lead time of a sales order. It also allows Dorman to grow as a company without having to add back labor as the volume of orders increases.
