Audit Criteria – Balancing Accuracy and Productivity

Imagine sending to QC only the orders that are most important or most likely to be wrong.

Customer wants, needs, and perceived needs are what drive your business.  Customers are the ones who are pushing you to ship more, to ship it faster, and to ship it more accurately.  In a recent survey, Supply Chain Insights discovered that the number one pain point for distribution center leaders is “Customer demands for shorter delivery.”

The problem is that the customer doesn’t want just any old product shipped to them quickly – they want the exact product they ordered shipped to them more quickly.  Too often, accuracy and productivity are seen as competing priorities in the DC.  If your associates had all the time in the world, they could triple-check orders and ensure you never have a return.  On the other hand, if you’re not too concerned with getting the order exactly right, then your associates could pick and ship something to the customer with lightning speed.  But to keep your customers happy, you need to find a balance. And advanced voice systems can help with both.

Prior to implementing voice at Eby-Brown, in order to ensure order accuracy for customers, every shipment went through QC.  The fact is, not all orders are created equal (or by equally experienced pickers).  Eby-Brown had to QC all orders because there was no way to distinguish for QC which orders were picked by the associate with the highest accuracy and which were picked by the guy who started on the job 20 minutes ago.  But this intensive, non-segmented quality control came at a price – a lot of person-hours spent on QC. How did they strike a balance between accuracy and productivity? Audit criteria.

Eby-Brown managers can use Lucas’s Engage Management Services Console to designate how often each type of order will go through QC.  Criteria can include who picked the order, what is contained in the order (more often for more expensive items), or what customer the order is for.  Chris Timmons of Eby-Brown explains the impact this has had on their bottom line:

“We’ve been able to reduce our QC costs as well, because now we don’t necessarily have to QC everything.  And we’re talking hundreds of thousands of individual items. And we can QC the stuff that’s important or that we think might be at risk, or we think might be in jeopardy of not being picked accurately.  So, it’s been a big, big saver for us.”