The small things...

In 2017 Unipart Rail took over the Unipart warehouse in Weedon to accommodate the ever-expanding activities around our contract to Anglian Water. At the same time, we took over the running of the RSPB fulfilment for its on-line shop, retail shops and key accounts which were already run out of Weedon.

Through the Unipart Way, our team members are all encouraged to identify and implement changes to processes to increase efficiency, reduce cycle time or reduce cost. Two examples of this are relatively small activities, but together have eliminated a staggering 640 hours of processing time, and eliminating 40,000 sheets of paper from operations.

We have recently moved over to the RSPB’s own ‘omnichannel system’ including a new warehouse management system in Weedon on the RSPB contract. The new system would have required us to create pick sheets onto paper to allow us to scan the order onto the new RF guns. This would have resulted in approx £500 per year in paper and ink cartridges to produce the pick sheets. 

Two team members - Piotr Szpitalny and Pras Thankisalam- worked together to give us a paperless solution by allowing the picker to scan a screen created in Google sheets instead of paper, saving us using 40,000 sheets of paper this year that would have ended up in the waste paper bin.

Also under the new system, the pack process required the operator to close down 3 pop up windows as part of the process. Jack Hedges took it upon himself to create a small program that runs in the background and once scanned will close down the pop up screens whilst the operator can get on and pack the order. This saved over 12 seconds off the process. Based on the forecast volumes of 201,000 orders for 2018 we will process this year it has saved us a massive 640 hours of non value added activity. 

These were great pieces of innovation work and was enthusiastically received by RSPB who have conservation and the environment at the forefront of what they do.