Falcon Jet Soars with WMS System, Inventory Slotting Revision, & Warehouse Redesign
Application:
Falcon Jet needed to update its Completion Facility warehouse
to handle growth, improve accuracy, reduce labor-intensity, and
increase speed. The project centered on a new warehouse layout,
implementation of a WMS (warehouse management) system, and
horizontal carousels.
The Little Rock facility is the main completion center for all
Falcon jets worldwide. The facility has virtually doubled in
size after a three-year expansion project. The latest expansion
added seven major buildings and nearly 200,000 square feet,
growing the completion center to a total of 478,500 square feet.
It is a facility unlike any other. Current production model
Falcon jets are manufactured in France, and then flown in
“green” condition to the completion center where optional
avionics and a custom interior are installed. Finally, the
exterior is custom painted.
The Little Rock center is perhaps the best-equipped facility of
its kind in the world, outfitted with a mixture of technical and
artistic ability designed to produce jets that can fly anywhere,
anytime in complete luxury. Master artisans work in classic
media to create gorgeous, custom interiors that can withstand
the knocks and dings of frequent use. Meanwhile, technical
colleagues devise cabin systems that unfailingly deliver sound,
data, images, conditioned air and electrical power.
“I can’t believe how beautiful the jets are,” said Michael
Wachowiak, Dassault Falcon’s Manager of Warehouse Operations.
The Situation:
Understanding what Wachowiak and his staff deal with begins
with understanding the complexity of Falcon Jet’s business. The
warehouse supplies material and components to the Production
Department in ways that many warehouse operations could never
fathom, since every jet is unique.
“This is such a complex facility,” Wachowiak said. “Everything
is intertwined, and everything touches other areas. It’s hard
for someone from the outside to understand what happens here.”
The diversity of the final product—completely custom jets, each
distinct from the other—sends waves of complexity down the
supply chain.
Many companies focus on producing what they produce by learning
how to precisely produce one thing exactly the same way, every
time. Falcon Jet can’t do that—its end products are almost never
the same. Production is as much art as science.
“A DC-9 is designed to carry a pre-ordained number of people
from this airport to that airport—and that’s all it does,”
Wachowiak explained. “Our jets are designed to go from a
130-degree tarmac in Nevada somewhere, fly around the world,
then land in Siberia. A tremendous amount of engineering goes
into our jets. What kind of field will you land on? A DC-9 knows
exactly that, every time. Our airplanes don’t—they’ll go
anywhere in the world, anytime.”
A thousand variances on a thousand factors
Falcon Jet’s customers are actively involved in the design of
their jets. The cabin, avionics, paint, and accessories can be
radically different from aircraft to aircraft. For the
warehouse, that means the task of accurately, quickly, and
efficiently supplying the production department with the right
components at the right time is critical.
Wachowiak’s warehouse must deliver a variety of critical
components for simultaneous, varied completion projects in an
accurate and timely manner. Further complicating the process,
Falcon Jet carries between 25,000 to 30,000 sku’s in active
inventory. Some of these items are avionics equipment, clamps,
hoses and other standard equipment. Others are exotic hardwood
panels, computers, television screens, furniture, linens,
crystal, and other items needed on corporate jets that have
specific security and storage requirements.
Desired Solution
When Wachowiak decided to make changes in his operation, he
targeted several areas:
Reduce labor intensity—especially in terms of paperwork
at the warehouse level. “We started by realizing that we had an
extremely labor-intensive, manual process of picking parts,
receiving parts, and stocking,” Wachowiak said.
“It took a large number of people to do this because there was
so much tribal knowledge involved—if a requirement was “x,” you
knew that you had to do something else in order to get to ‘x.’”
Overabundant paperwork was a problem: In Falcon Jet’s
system, a production document was used to pick orders. The
documents were generated in Excel and printed for the warehouse.
As large as a good-sized paperback novel, the production
documents could be 2” thick with much of the text dedicated to
production, inspection, quality, and safety procedures that had
nothing to do with picking.
“80% to 90% of the document was totally irrelevant to the
warehouse operations,” Wachowiak said. “It had no bearing on our
mission of providing parts. It had to do with inspection, to
record other data, to give instructions to production to apply
the parts to the aircraft. It was an assembly work order, not a
picking list.”
Pickers had to read the document and find needed parts by
deciphering production instructions. “We would think, “there’s a
part, oh, here’s a part.” And highlight it,” said Wachowiak.
“Then we’d go to a computer to find where the part was
inventoried, then we would finally pick it.”
A warehouse worker could spend hours culling through a large
production document and looking up part locations on a
particular project without pulling a single part.
“I just wanted to know what I had to supply to production,”
Wachowiak said. “What part number do they want? How many do they
want? When do they want it? Pretty simple, but that’s how it
evolved. We didn’t want the excess information.”
Reduce errors in the picking process: Due to the way orders were
received, Wachowiak knew his operation suffered from needlessly
high error rates. “There were obviously errors being made in our
picking process due to the way we received information,” he
said.
Improve inventory accuracy: “Inventory accuracy was
good,” Said Wachowiak. “We maintained a rating around 98%. But
we expended a lot of energy to keep it there.”
Reduce cycle time without increasing headcount: The
manual system, combined with Falcon Jet’s overall business
complexity, created problems in the warehouse that lengthened
picking times. “We’re trying to take days out of the cycle right
now,” Wachowiak said. “What we wanted to do based on the growth
rate we anticipated was to pull the parts and receive the
parts—all the warehousing activities—give credits, support our
customers with spare parts shipments.
“We didn’t want to pack more bodies in here to get that done. We
were looking for a way to streamline our process.”
The Outcome:
Falcon Jet’s solution revolves around a new Warehouse
Management System implementation, specified through the
consulting efforts of CEI Logistics.
“I hadn’t dealt with consultants that much,” said Wachowiak.
“But they became partners with us. They got to know our
business. They were our advocates, and helped us make sure that
timelines were set and met for the project. We knew what we were
supposed to do and when it was supposed to be completed. They
helped us identify internal problems and take corrective action,
or at least a plan to overcome our problems.”
The software selection process can be daunting for companies who
have never dealt with the breadth and depth of WMS solutions on
the market. Wachowiak understood that there were hundreds of
software packages available, and that a professional evaluation
of his needs had to be done to determine the correct solution.
“They (CEI Logistics consultants) were a terrific liaison with
the software people,” Wachowiak said.
Under the new system, Falcon Jet’s warehouse workers no longer
sort through extremely long production documents to find the
parts they need to pick. “When orders are released, they go to
our RF guns,” Wachowiak said. “The picker then starts picking
parts. There is no looking to this or that information, or
picking through a big document. You just have to pick parts.”
This has driven down the time it takes to pick an order and
created labor savings in the process. Falcon Jet is faster and
more efficient.
“We have portable printers that go along with the RF gun. Those
printers provide all the information. We pick a part, put it in
a bag, slap a label on it, and we’re done. Move to the next
one,” said Wachowiak. “We’ve had a dramatic decrease in the
amount of time we have to spend on clerical activities.”
The system also created more management tools. “We are now
date-driven by due date, by priority. There is a lot more
discipline now than before. We’re able to manage our activities
better than we were previously. There is more easily obtainable
tracking information and historical data. We can get our hands
on it,” Wachowiak said. “We also have a method for hot picks,
for if a part fails, or if one gets lost.”
Once parts are pulled, they are staged in lockers for the
production department. The parts are pulled in advance of when
the production floor needs them. The warehouse has to be ready
for production to work out of sequence on a project, or a number
of projects.
Prior to the WMS and carousels, parts were stored in the
warehouse alphanumerically. Families of parts were stored in the
same general area—all hoses in one place, all clamps in
another—classified by the kind of component they were. “That was
good in its time,” said Wachowiak, “but we had parts that were
being requested all the time stored in inaccessible locations.”
The warehouse layout has changed so that parts are stored
primarily by velocity. The most frequently used items are the
most readily available, reducing the amount of time pickers
spend on them. “We’re moving inventory based on velocity,”
Wachowiak said. Frequency of use determines placement.
Wachowiak reports that Falcon Jet’s picking accuracy has
improved. “If a person doesn’t have to look up a location or
guess what part it is, and have to verify it, they’re more
accurate,” he said. “There are fewer opportunities for a
mistake.”
“It’s a very unique business,” Wachowiak said, as he watched
technicians work on a gleaming corporate jet. “But we have the
ability to react quicker and better now than we did before. We
have more control over the situation.”
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