As Jim Kimble often says, no one cares about moving thousands of brown boxes a day – right up until they don’t get out the door on time, then everyone cares! Jim is the COO at Jasco Products and he is responsible for a 500,000 square foot warehouse that employs over 100 people to do nothing all day but move boxes off trucks, onto shelves, and then back off the shelves and back onto trucks. There is nothing hard about this, one would think. But that is only if you have never actually had to get this done efficiently and without failing at even putting one wrong item in one wrong box. The big problem Jim had was the dark side of a business growing steadily for years; the more Jasco grew, the more volume Jim had to handle each and every day, and his warehouse was bursting at the seams.
When confronted with this situation a company has a few options; one is to build a bigger warehouse and add more people. This is costly and bites into the revenues that are so hard to grow. The second option would be to outsource all of this to a logistics company, but again, the costs can be high, and there is some loss of control over quality. The third option is what Jim chose one fateful day in 2012 and that was to upgrade Jasco’s warehouse management system (WMS). His goal was to make an investment in technology that could help the warehouse run much more efficiently so that they could move more brown boxes, with less people. Today that decision looks brilliant, but back in 2012 it was a hard sell.
Although Jim had complete faith in the decision to go with technology as a solution, the investment needed by the company was not small. It was going to take a noticeable percentage of the profits for that year to cover the costs for both the software and all the hardware that would be needed. It was into this situation that I stepped because Jasco hired Future Point of View to help advise them on technology strategy. The first specific decision I had to help with was whether to green light the WMS investment. Jim had done a great job of studying the ROI and it was clear to us that Jasco should get an 18-month payback. I threw my support behind Jim and the decision (frankly, Jim and his team had already done all the hard work so all I did was vote yes). The project was green lighted and the fun began. No, a blog is no place for the middle part of this story because this would then become a “white paper,” so let’s just skip all the fun of the software install and talk about the outcome. As we sit here in 2014, the warehouse is highly automated, highly measured, and running at a level of efficiency that was simply unachievable before implementing the new technology tools. Jim is happy, his team is happy, and Jasco is happy. None of this would have happened without a great decision being made on an investment that seemed risky at the time. Also, none of this happens without a leader with the courage to stand up and wear the yoke of risk and reward.
In a world where all the buzz is about the latest social startup or wearable device, it is good to remember that some of the most impressive things that happen with technology are just the ability to move thousands of brown boxes better than we ever have been able to do in the past!