Here at Transfire, we’ve decided we do not want to simply be one of many good regional delivery companies: we would like to study logistics in its entirety, and use our research to bring the best skills to the market. The greatest change we have made so far this year is to consciously apply the principles of lean manufacturing to our business. You may ask, how does a retail-focused delivery company adopt lean production techniques? This is an excellent question. The industries of manufacturing and delivery are quite different. However, at the heart of the issue we find a specific posture that changes everything: fulfilling demand. This post will be focusing on the idea of one-piece flow. What does one-piece flow mean for Transfire? How can a delivery company use a method that was originally intended for manufacturing?

 

First, what is one-piece flow?

One-piece flow describes the process of constructing a single finished product on an assembly line without being part of a batch, beginning at the time of demand, continuing until the moment it becomes inventory. 

In other words, imagine going to a one-person hot dog stand and ordering one hot dog from the seller. She takes your order, makes your food in front of you, and hands it to you. The process that takes place from the time you make your order until you are handed your food is a simple example of one-piece flow. There is one hot dog being made at a time, one step at a time, to your specific order, in a single, fluid process which the maker is in total control of. Now imagine if you could go to a car dealership and receive the same experience with your new SUV—wouldn’t that extra care be worth something? Well, it turns out that some car companies have had the same dream. It doesn’t quite work as simply, but it’s as close as we can get while still being cost-effective, using modern production techniques. The result is an assembly line system in which one car flows through the workstations—rather than, say, forty cars. The assembly workers have to perform fewer actions, and have time to think about what they are doing, which helps them avoid defects, or even allows them to perform assembly instructions unique to the specific vehicle. The same technique carries over to the production of many complex products—think pianos or, on a smaller scale, cameras; or something that requires extreme precision, such as medical equipment. 

This process is but one of several techniques that has helped revolutionize manufacturing. One-piece flow is a bedrock tenet of lean manufacturing. Lean manufacturing—or “lean” as we call it at our company—is a concept that was developed in Japan in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Toyota may be the best-known practitioner of lean manufacturing today, but it is far from the only company profiting from it. The techniques involved in lean helped Japan (a relatively medium-sized country with a deeply entrenched medieval past) to become the manufacturing powerhouse it still is today. Lean’s idea is simply to produce goods as efficiently as possible according to demand. In other words, make what is needed when it is needed, in the best possible way, to ensure there are no defects and ensuing returns, no excess inventory, and no glutting the market. This “just-in-time” approach is a recipe for holistic success: loyal (because satisfied) customers, a diminished need to out-predict competitors in sales projections, and the erasure of warehouse-clogging inventory that would need to be dumped or sold at a discount. 

Seeing as Transfire doesn’t produce anything, how do we deal with this concept in the warehouse? Transfire is a retail pool-distribution carrier. That means a large part of our business is carrying goods from multiple, not-associated retail companies to their respective stores from our warehouse, where these goods are temporarily stored. We don’t change anything about the way our clients make their products. Instead, we want to ensure that each delivery is primed to exactly the specifications of each particular retailer—even though we are dealing with several at a time. Furthermore, our drivers have to know the ins-and-outs of each particular retailer, and how, for example, they want their product to be protected in-transit. 

To us at Transfire, each retail shipment package is that “one piece.” First, we receive the demand from the retailer. It’s for their own product, and comes from their own distribution center, yet we are fully on the hook to make sure it gets from “them” (their factory) to them (their consumer-facing retail store). After receiving the trailer from their center, each package is unloaded by hand, inspected for rips, leaks, missing labels crushed corners, etc., by our sort team, and noted accordingly. Packages that were damaged en-route to our warehouse are re-taped or labeled as needed. Each package goes on a pallet for its respective store, which must be stacked stably. Each stacked pallet is then wrapped, covered with a top-sheet if necessary, labeled by store number, and staged for delivery. and lastly the last-mile delivery drivers are given instruction as needed for making sure each package is delivered safely to the store, where it becomes inventory. 

Although Transfire has used this approach with retailers for several years, the one-piece flow/just-in-time ideal has lately taken on renewed importance and clarity. Thanks to our investment in educational resources, such as The 2-Second Lean, we have allowed front-line employees to appreciate their role in the logistics chain, and in their team. Likewise, we’ve taken the idea of one-piece flow to mean that each delivery stop and delivery route has come to have its particular identity, and each member of the sort team is given the responsibility to stage particular delivery routes in a simple, efficient way that greatly benefits drivers and sorters. 

Most excitingly, lean is a culture shift that cannot help but have ripple effects that go up and down the supply chain. Recently, we made a transition in line-haul companies who service our warehouse. Instead of utilizing a larger company which sometimes needed to leave its trailers at our site for extended periods of time, we went with a company which was much more active in using its trailers. As a result, we no longer have doors that are blocked off by empty trailers. Additionally, these trailers are sometimes repurposed so that they are filled with out-going shipments only minutes after they are unloaded. A partnership like this shows just how much logistics, like manufacturing, is much more about constant, consistent, intelligent utilization of resources than it is about creating loads or batches of epic proportion. Because we are able to treat our resources as resources more often, rather than seeing them as wastes of space or even liabilities, we have improved the quality of our service for multiple members of the logistics chain, including our team members, our line-haul service, and of course our retail clients. 

If you found this subject interesting, stay tuned to the Transfire blog. We’ll update you with more lean stories, in-depth discussion of crucial logistics terminology, and knowledge that will change the way you see your companies needs.

 

Michael Taverne

Sort Lead Tukwila Warehouse