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Professional Services: Order Fulfillment and Execution Solution

Snap-on Business Solution's Order Fulfillment and Execution solution takes orders that have been received from OEM production facilities and generates an optimal picking plan to fulfill each order just before the truck arrives to pick up the complete order.

In the last few years, more and more vehicle and equipment manufacturing facilities have adopted Toyota Production System (TPS) principles and standards including, Heijunka leveling and kanban-based picking.

For most plants, orders are received by the facility corresponding to a preset ordering pattern and shipment schedule. Once orders for each day are received, a smooth picking schedule must be defined that accommodates the truck arrival times for each order. In addition to this, a production order must be defined to ensure that parts are available when they are needed.

A smooth picking schedule in this case is often defined as one where each picking cycle roughly mirrors the others in terms of level picking of individual part numbers, level picking of all part numbers together for each cycle and across all cycles, storage locations and storage regions.

Common Issues: Many facilities are challenged with limited space, and sharp ramp-ups or ramp-downs in demand. Therefore, they often need to:

	Optimize the use of existing limited space.
	Improve the accuracy of filled orders.
	Provide a better structure for picking operations, all while adapting to demand fluctuations.

In addition, many organizations struggle with:

	Manual order fulfillment scheduling systems that are often inefficient in producing both a smooth set of picking cycles and a balanced set of production orders.
	A limited number of staging lanes pre-assigned to specific customers with defined order combinations staged in each lane in a set sequence.
	Pick Kanbans needed to be printed at the beginning of each cycle for each team member with pick instructions.

Solution: Snap-on's Optimized Order Fulfillment and Execution Solution optimizes orders that have been received from OEM production facilities and generates an optimal picking plan to fulfill each order just before the truck arrives to pick up the complete order, by examining factors across a number of dimensions, including:

	Picking cycle (approximately the same number of parts picked from cycle-to-cycle).
	Part (pick each unique part number as smoothly as possible at each location, and for all parts across all locations).
	Region (pick all parts in this region as smoothly as possible).
	Then the optimization intelligence - built by Snap-on - finds a solution that optimizes factors across all of these dimensions (while respecting a variety of constraints including: breaks, truck load times, assigned staging lane availability, order aggregation rules, etc.).
	The system then manages the printing of the fulfillment kanban cards at each picking region, for each cycle while tracking unmet demand (no parts in bin).
	The system also provides floor-wide visibility of team member performance for each cycle and each picking region and order completion.
	An additional feature of the system is that it groups the optimized solution into production buckets and transmits the orders to the production system "pre-leveled". The production system then indicates production times that provides parts "just-in-time" so that stock on hand of finished goods is limited to hours or minutes of supply.

Solution Benefits through Snap-on's Optimized Order Fulfillment and Execution Solution, manufacturing organizations can:

	Improve floor space utilization.
	Increase the speed and accuracy of order fulfillment.
	Better control labor and scheduling.
	Reduce overall costs in production control and fulfillment.