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Challenge: New Facility & Overwhelming Demand In January 2019, Crossroads Community Services, a nonprofit that works to alleviate food insecurities, grew its operation from about 10,000 square feet to over 70,000 square feet. The organization initially sought assistance from Malin to maximize use of the new distribution facility as well as learn best practices for receiving/shipping and inventory control.
As the food pantry was starting to become comfortable in the new facility, the economic effects of the Covid-19 pandemic impacted the Dallas area in March 2020, essentially doubling the number of daily visits and creating unprecedented demand. -
Solution: Introduce Lean Management Procedures Malin was asked to help improve operational inefficiencies by identifying and analyzing wasted time, space, and movement. By leveraging the principles of Raymond Lean Management (RLM), Crossroads Community Services increased the capacity of its new warehouse and implemented technology upgrades throughout other departments.
Additionally, RLM empowered employees to make improvements and take ownership of the tasks they accomplished daily. By teaching workers to spot inefficiencies or potential errors in their work, lean management provided them with practical tools to share their ideas and develop impactful, long-term solutions. -
Result: Efficient Operation & Customer Experience While using RLM strategies and techniques to process, store and distribute food, the pantry distributed more than 2,750,000 pounds of food in 2020, as the network collectively distributed 11,800,000 pounds of food over the same time.
For Crossroads, these continuous improvements extended far beyond the warehouse floor as they optimized order picking processes, donation center methods, and the overall shopping experience to create a one-way shopping lane with 110-120 SKUs that eliminates the need to backtrack for missed items.
About Raymond Lean Management
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Raymond Lean Management (RLM) procedures and techniques are based on the world-renowned Toyota Production System (TPS), which focuses on waste reduction through visualization, standardized work, target-based key performance indicators (KPIs), and continuous improvement activities to provide the best possible solutions. When applied correctly, RLM can effectively and efficiently produce optimized processes for all aspects of a company’s core business functions, ultimately leading to cost savings that can be used to purchase intralogistics solutions for the task at hand or reinvested throughout the organization.
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Contact us today for a free consultation that will help you better understand your current operation and how it can be enhanced to achieve greater operational efficiencies and keep your operation competitive and profitable.
