It’s Friday afternoon and you and your DC staff are looking forward to a nice long, relaxing weekend. Suddenly, you get an alert that four reefer trucks full of ice cream bars have arrived at your dock door. You quickly realize that you don’t have enough dock doors in the refrigerated section of your distribution center to handle four trucks, you don’t have enough forklift drivers certified for work in that section on duty and you don’t have enough free space or racking in the freezer section to hold that much product. Your next thought might be—what nut case ordered these? Or, why didn’t someone tell me about this?
Even if you’ve never had to store or ship ice cream bars, you can likely relate to having to scramble because someone up the line made plans that were beyond your capacity to fulfill. Your company might even have tried instituting a monthly forecast meeting to help mitigate these kinds of problems. But how successful have you been in getting the people in purchasing or merchandising to understand or even care about your constraints such as dock doors, storage capacity or workforce limitations? The fact is, until you can get corporate planning systems intimately familiar with your real-world, ever-changing logistics constraints, you’ll be the one who ends up scrambling.