To pay tribute to members of the middle tier in the beverage alcohol industry, Beverage Wholesaler has put together our first annual Distributor Best Practices Awards. This first year was a success, and we are honoring five companies who have demonstrated innovation in running efficient, successful operations.
Innovation within a warehouse is crucial to help boost a company’s productivity, and ultimately, its bottom line. Columbia Distributing‘s ability to innovate earned them a win in our Best Warehouse Innovation category.
Columbia Distributing’s Inventory Dashboard
Since Columbia Distributing launched its Inventory Dashboard, the company has saved both time and labor, along with more accurately tracking products. Created as a “single source of truth,” the dashboard manages Columbia’s inventory across all branches and departments from the moment it lands at the dock all the way through the trade to retail customers and end consumers.
“Since launching the dashboard, we have achieved labor and time savings equivalent to approximately one full FTE (full-time equivalent),” says Columbia Distributing’s chief operating officer Chris Wright. “Additionally, its use has led to a 30% decrease in out-of-stocks, a 9% reduction in out-of-code items and a 38% improvement in slotting utilization.”
Columbia’s previous methods required a high level of technical expertise with its Warehouse Management Systems and time-consuming individual report building, the company states. Through an 11-month collaborative process across many departments, the Optimization Team worked with Purchasing, Sales, IT, Business Development and Warehouse teammates to create an easy-to-use Power BI Dashboard to service all inventory reporting needs across the organization.
From the moment inventory arrives from a supplier, it is scanned into Columbia’s network. Within minutes, the product and its location can be seen on the Inventory Dashboard, the company states.
Code dates are immediately available, which gives the Business Development team an easy-to-read and color-coded scorecard to ensure that items are moving through the warehouses at a rate that doesn’t threaten their quality in the trade.
“This dashboard has fundamentally changed the way we are able to manage our 80 million annual cases of inventory across 14 branches and two states,” Wright states. “It’s created a ‘single source of truth’ and helps us ensure that we’re delivering the highest quality product to our customers.”
To ensure the warehouse has the appropriate amount of product on hand, sales and purchasing teams can see Velocity and Days on Hand data. This allows them to see if something needs to be ordered before initiating incentives or special programming, the company states.
Velocity data also helps warehouse teams identify items that have slower daily rates of sale and send them back to the hub branches in exchange for faster moving items. This helps ensure that the product is being picked for the retailer close to the source.
The best part? The dashboard wasn’t even that time-consuming to implement.
Without creating additional work for Columbia’s frontline teammates, the company used the systems and technology already in place to pull inventory data from multiple sources into the dashboard.
“The dashboard resulted from a Lean project aimed at optimizing inventory management and reducing waste,” says Wright. “It was a collaborative effort involving a cross-departmental team that worked diligently to find a solution. Once the team agreed on the goals, our analytics team took the lead in building the required data connections and dashboards. The entire project took about 12 months to complete.”
“I’m thrilled that our team is being recognized for their great work,” says Chris Steffanci, president and CEO of Columbia Distributing. “So many people from all aspects of our organization collaborated on this to make us a more effective and efficient business.”
