Publicação
Reduction of the overnight distribution cycle time in a warehousing company using Lean Six Sigma
| Resumo: | With an ever-growing competition in third party logistics, companies have been looking further and further to improve their competitive advantage over others by improving their processes to increase capacity and reduce costs as much as possible. This has often resulted in the aim of reducing their process’s cycle times. With this reality in mind, this research focuses on a Portuguese third party logistics provider, Santos e Vale, aiming to improve its competitive edge. Following an Action Research based methodology, this project worked side-by-side with the company’s stakeholders focusing on achieving meaningful practical and academic contributions. The Action Research methodology was combined with Lean Six Sigma to draw the best advantages of this last one regarding process improvement. Lean Six Sigma and its tools were used to structure this research such as the DMAIC tool. This research began with both a broad and a more specific and detailed mapping of the process to completely understand it allowing for, afterwards, data to be gathered regarding measurements of the process performance, such as the baseline cycle time. It was discovered that the process suffered from several hindrances such as the lack of warehouse operators, late cargo delivery by the customers and the lack of truck sets. To tackle these difficulties 3 solutions ended up being selected for implementation: Hiring extra warehouse operators, reassigning the responsibility of processing a problematic customer to a larger warehouse and acquiring new trailers. Out of these, in the end, only the first two ended up going through with their implementation, as the third was not possible to successfully implement given other discovered impediments. Following the implementation, a period of control and analysis of the results of said implementation was designated, which recorded a median process cycle time improvement of 5,402%. |
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| Autores principais: | Alves, Rafael Canas Correia |
| Assunto: | Action research Lean Six Sigma DMAIC Process improvement Third party logistics provider Investigação-Ação Melhoria de processo Logística -- Logistics Prestação de serviços logísticos a terceiros |
| Ano: | 2024 |
| País: | Portugal |
| Tipo de documento: | dissertação de mestrado |
| Tipo de acesso: | acesso embargado |
| Instituição associada: | ISCTE |
| Idioma: | inglês |
| Origem: | Repositório ISCTE |
| Resumo: | With an ever-growing competition in third party logistics, companies have been looking further and further to improve their competitive advantage over others by improving their processes to increase capacity and reduce costs as much as possible. This has often resulted in the aim of reducing their process’s cycle times. With this reality in mind, this research focuses on a Portuguese third party logistics provider, Santos e Vale, aiming to improve its competitive edge. Following an Action Research based methodology, this project worked side-by-side with the company’s stakeholders focusing on achieving meaningful practical and academic contributions. The Action Research methodology was combined with Lean Six Sigma to draw the best advantages of this last one regarding process improvement. Lean Six Sigma and its tools were used to structure this research such as the DMAIC tool. This research began with both a broad and a more specific and detailed mapping of the process to completely understand it allowing for, afterwards, data to be gathered regarding measurements of the process performance, such as the baseline cycle time. It was discovered that the process suffered from several hindrances such as the lack of warehouse operators, late cargo delivery by the customers and the lack of truck sets. To tackle these difficulties 3 solutions ended up being selected for implementation: Hiring extra warehouse operators, reassigning the responsibility of processing a problematic customer to a larger warehouse and acquiring new trailers. Out of these, in the end, only the first two ended up going through with their implementation, as the third was not possible to successfully implement given other discovered impediments. Following the implementation, a period of control and analysis of the results of said implementation was designated, which recorded a median process cycle time improvement of 5,402%. |
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