Cross Docking can provide significant improvements in efficiency by looking for outstanding requirements for an item (production orders, sales orders, replenishment orders) and automatically assigning the incoming item to that requirement instead of putting the item away into inventory, only to retrieve it later. Consider implementing cross-docking at your facility. 

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Just a refresher on a tip I’ve shared previously from Supply Chain Technology Bulletin regarding how to attain greater inventory accuracy. I thought it would be worthwhile to share again:

• Record data regarding your inventory as soon as the items arrive at your door / receiving dock. With information, you can make decisions. Without it, you waste money, time and effort.
• Leverage data collection, label generation and RFID solutions to make your life easier.
• Set inventory accuracy goals for the business and for employees.
• Train your employees so they know what is expected of them, and how to best perform their job and therefore how best to maintain accurate inventory counts.
• Count the inventory – and do it regularly. Find a method that works best for your employees, and for your business.

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Employee empowerment is important if you want to retain the skilled workforce you have and attract new talent.

Here are 5 ways you can motivate your employees to give their best every day

1. Train your employees
2. Give your employees the right tools
3. Automate processes
4. Give your employees real-time feedback
5. Provide incentives to do more

Can you do it? Of course you can!
You don’t have to do it all by yourself. Companies like Crossroads RMC can assist. We provide training services which can be completely tailored to your business. We also provide software solutions to help automate many of your manual processes, and dashboard solutions to provide real-time feedback on performance.

If you choose to do this, the benefits to your company will be amazing. You will have a happy, loyal and prepared workforce, ready to come to work each day to make the company wildly successful.

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Want to increase your efficiency across your organization?

Is access to real time data important to you?

Take a look at how and where your information is stored. Do you have employees keeping separate spreadsheets or databases outside of your ERP?

Separate data silos means that information is not being shared between departments. This can hamper growth, and cut down on overall efficiency. Take a look at why these silos exist. Can something be done within your ERP system to avoid having to store the information elsewhere? Can an integration be created to allow the ERP to have exposure to other databases, or allow updates to occur between systems?

Need help figuring out where to start? Contact us. We’d be happy to help.

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• Print Sales Order History Information - all invoices processed through sales
• Check Inventory Valuation - this should tie out to your inventory accounts
• Print Integration Information - see all postings from WIP to finished goods
• Print G/L Transaction Information - print specific transaction types for any GL account
• Print Lot Control Information - will show where serial numbers were used

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Standard costing is really a ‘best guess’ at labor costing -- these numbers are often inaccurate, incomplete or out of date.

Accurate job costing requires the capture of all tasks associated with a specific product or job, including direct and indirect labor in setup, production and customer service.

Inaccuracies in the collection of time allocated to machinery and the use of materials can result in the inability to properly pass those charges through to the customer, reducing company profitability.

Basically, you can’t manage what you can’t measure -- and you can’t measure what you can’t track. So the inability to track time-to task ultimately inhibits maximum utilization of the workforce. Unproductive activities remain hidden from sight -- managers don’t have the information needed to understand where wasted time exists, and therefore cannot create an action plan to remove it.

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• Sit down with your IT team. Decide how the information will be captured and where it will be stored so that employees have access to it. What software tools need to be used to capture the information? How does it need to be organized? Create a repeatable process to make this easy for your staff.
   
• Interview the person. Have them talk you through his/her job. What are the things they do every day? What are their biggest challenges? How do they overcome them? 
   
• Have someone shadow the person for a week. Watch what they do and how they do it. Ask questions. Who does he/she interact with in their department? Outside of their department? Why?
   
• Find out what tools he/she uses to perform their job? Are there spreadsheets?  Reports within your ERP / outside of your ERP? Separate stand-alone databases? Drawings? Websites? Why does he/she use them?
   
• Video record how the person does their job. Is their technique critical to “doing it right” the first time and not ending up with a bunch of scrap that you can’t reuse?
   
• Figure out if the person does anything special on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis that might not come up during the observation period or interview. 
   
• Map how he/she uses your business system and how that impacts the rest of the company. Understand both the “what” and the “why”. Without this, new employees may end up figuring out what they need to do, but never understand why they need to do it.

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• Are you tracking downtime? Is it done manually, or with some type of automation or application that gathers information in real-time, or is it based upon history?
• If you are measuring team effectiveness by shift, you know there are significant differences between them. Have you figured out why?

One of our automotive customers was experiencing significant inefficiencies and difficulties with their receiving operations. After analyzing their operation, we discovered a disconnect between how they were tracking their incoming goods and what their ERP system thought was on hand.

This disconnect created time-consuming steps to process incoming material and determine where the material was needed. The manual process slowed production, caused additional staffing needs and hindered their ability to effectively get needed material to the assembly line. They chose to implement our data collection solution to automate the process.

Since implementing the solution, receiving and moving material was quicker, more accurate and efficient. This enabled the addition of another assembly line, increasing production volume – without adding staff.

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