A Major Fresh Protein Processor Increases Warehouse Storage and Throughput Capacity

Client Context

One of the largest fresh protein processing companies in North America needed to address sever processing and warehousing storage in their mid-Atlantic  operations, in the face of increasing transportation costs with deteriorating EBITDA. Compounding the assignment was a lack of data integrity and production processing controls that made identifying the needed capacities and best measure of initial project ROI challenging.

Approach & Key Success Factors

ARGO-EFESO created three work streams across four facilities starting with a 5-year capacity plan, a throughput/flow rate maximization workstream, and a network strategic planning exercise. Each facility now processes and holds inventory to assess required inventories and throughput, with a new brown-field warehouse design, and a transportation management system (TMS) selection.

ARGO-EFESO partnered with the client to deliver an 10-15% throughput/efficiency improvement over the four locations with the following actions:

• Deployed new measures to understand the actual daily turn of pallets, cases, and items for each facility to accumulate throughput needs, physical space, and inbound shipping from farms and outbound shipping to customers.
• Led efforts to execute a quick network design of the mid-Atlantic, using processing plant sources, customer locations, and volumes by storage condition to select a target area for the new location. ARGO-EFESO then completed warehouse design efforts down at the pallet location count and configuration, design of flow picking patterns for a new high-velocity cold storage warehouse facility. The facility was designed  for an annual turn of 105 times average inventory and to operate at 90% of for the existing distribution platform.
• Executed an RFP to 4 major cold storage 3PL warehousing companies to select a 3PL site and to build out the facility . A 7-year contact was negotiated with the selected 3PL.
• Executed an additional RFP to select a new transportation management system (TMS) to improve visibility, optimize customer delivery routing on a private fleet, manage driver hours, and to deploy a multisite Yard Management solution. A solution was selected by using the ARGO-EFESO TMS Ready approach to access needs, as well as the right technology partner for this client.

Results

10-15%

Throughput improvement in four processing sites across three U.S. states.

39%

More warehouse storage and throughput capacity in the mid-Atlantic region.

11%

Reduction in cost per delivery for the company’s private fleet.