Summary and Results of the 2007-2008 Material Handling Student Design Competition
Sponsored by the College Industry Council on Material Handling Education (CICMHE) and Bastian Material Handling (BMH)
Each year, the Material Handling Student Design Competition provides student teams with the opportunity to design a manufacturing or distribution facility to support the objectives of a fictional company (case content is drawn from real-world implementations). Actual company names are changed along with some aspects of the data to provide the appropriate challenge to the student teams as well as protecting the identity of the actual company and their products. The 2007-2008 case was developed by Bastian Material Handling.
Contest Case Summary Description
The Blue Ridge Apparel Group (BRAG) distributes sport clothing and footwear to their customers through traditional retail outlets located in malls and pro-shops, plus direct to consumer business through their on-line internet portal. While new retail outlets are being added and old ones are closed or reducing their use of BRAG product, there is still an observed net growth in retail outlet fulfillment of about 8% per year. It is felt that faster order fulfillment will reduce the rate at which the retail outlet customers leave or reduce their order levels. Direct to Consumer fulfillment has been growing at about 22% per year, but is largely attributed to the addition of new lines of footwear. Forecasts for growth of this segment are expected to be 15%.
The existing warehouse and distribution infrastructure includes a BRAG owned 158,000 sq ft facility from which orders are shipped. 3rd party logistics providers manage the reserve stock of full pallet load inventory and provide replenishment logistics to the BRAG owned distribution facility. The distribution facility uses a combination of bulk storage on floor, pallet rack, flow rack, and shelving to manage the inventory that has been positioned for order fulfillment. A simple conveyor system is used to transport totes full of picked materials to the value adding room and shipping. No computerized warehouse control system is used to control either the conveyor or the order fulfillment process.
BRAG engaged the design teams to develop and propose modifications and improvements to their existing warehousing and distribution infrastructure with a goal of accommodating the forecast growth for five (5) years. The deliverable will be a master plan for change that can be monitored and adjusted as the future unfolds. BRAG wishes to improve overall order picking productivity so as to accommodate business growth without expansion of the existing workforce, eliminate paper, reduce picking errors, eliminate the need for the 3rd party logistics element of the existing infrastructure, reduce backorders caused by outages related to inventory inaccuracy, shorten promised order lead times from 24 hours to same day ship, and reduce overall inventories.
The teams were asked to develop a phased master plan to allow BRAG to incorporate change in ways that minimize possible disruption of ongoing operations, and include “trigger points” at which change phases need to be started to keep pace with forecast growth patterns. Finally, each team needed to provide cost justification of each phase and recommendations for next steps.
Judging
The three academic and two industry judges evaluated the entries according to the criteria of product flow, equipment utilization, space utilization, operational plan, overall integration and economic justification. Additionally, the judges were asked to evaluate writing quality, analysis and presentation.
CICMHE is pleased to announce the following results:
First Place ($1500 split among the team plus $500 for the department):
Logan Wells, Charlie Crawford, Justin Love and Kelvin Yuen
Virginia Tech
Yasemin Merzifonluoglu, Advisor
Second Place (TIE): ($1500 split among the teams plus $500 for each department):
Joshua Monsees, Leonardo Gala, Andrew Lawlor and Lindsay Power
Rochester Institute of Technology
Andres Carrano, Advisor
Brent Carter, Sean O’Meara, Kevin Oden and Jonathan Jones
University of Arkansas
Russell Meller, Advisor
Honorable Mentions:
Anton Slobodnik, Sviatoslav Reutovski, Chris Ramirez and Juan Raya
Cal Poly State University
Liz Schlemer, Advisor