If you walked into the Total Hockey St. Louis distribution
center in May 2014, chances are you would not enjoy your stay.
Warehouse employees, as well as store patrons and office
dwellers, managed inventory counts the same way most companies do in this day
and age: totaling each and every item by hand. Although it was the
tried-and-true way for businesses throughout time, it was a tedious task that
never drew positive attention.
“It was barbaric,” said David Crosby, the St. Louis
warehouse supervisor of returns and receiving. “(It was) completely impossible
to stay on task and know exactly what you’ve already scanned in.”
One of the people working through this tedious task was
Total Hockey’s chief information officer (CIO), Steve Blackmore. The leader of
the company’s tech team stepped away from his desk and joined the warehouse
staff to not only help with the daunting task of taking inventory, but to gauge
the job itself and how it could be done more efficiently.
“I grabbed a scanner and went through the same process that
anyone in the warehouse would do,” he said. “As I got into the warehouse, I
couldn’t help but think this is
cumbersome. You could easily lose your place if you were distracted. You
had no way to see where you left off.”
Blackmore, along with his team of technology experts, set
off to find a better way of managing the yearly inventory count. It was rolled
into the company’s Warehouse Management System (WMS), as well as a plethora of
other advances that have seemingly carried Total Hockey into a new age of
retail.
“(WMS has) a long way to go,” said Blackmore, “but it’s
brought us to a spot where we are with the retail big boys from an
inventory-management perspective.”
Blackmore’s newest system, which was in development long
before he partook in inventory, scrapped the old methods and ushered in an
entirely new form of thinking in terms of warehouse administration.
It was this complete restructure that led to Blackmore’s
nomination as a Retail Info Systems (RIS)
News CIO of the Year in the Innovation category. He will be traveling to
the 14th annual Retail Executive Summit in Laguna, Calif. at the
Montage Resort, June 17-19, and is one of 12 nominees up for four separate
awards, which also include Strategic
Impact, Rookie of the Year and Career
Achievement (the latter selected by the editors of RIS News).
Blackmore received
the nomination thanks to Total Hockey President Michael Benoit and strategy
team leader Rob Bowers sending in their nomination request. The RIS News website asked for selections in
each category – Benoit and Bowers couldn’t think of a better candidate.
“Our omni-channel technology is the single greatest
competitive advantage in our niche industry,” Bowers said. “Steve made it all
possible. This award is a symbol of Steve’s amazing contribution towards Total
Hockey’s success, and we are incredibly grateful for his dedication, insight,
leadership, architecture and ability to turn dreams into reality.”
Ending the
Guessing Game
Another actualization with WMS is the ability for the system
to alert warehouse staff where items need to go. In the past, when a pallet of
merchandise arrived at a distribution center, the employee would scan each item
one-by-one and decide where to send each individual piece, or await a report
from the supply chain department detailing the desired locations.
Now, employees use handheld scanners and are instantly
informed not only if it belongs in the warehouse or in stores, but exactly to
which store it should be sent.
“It was a complete
guessing game, at times,” said Crosby. “We would have no idea where anything
belonged and stores would be receiving an abundance of the same item. Now, the
guessing has been taken out of it and we can focus our energy on more important
tasks.”
Chaos binning is a
relatively new term to Total Hockey staff, but it’s been welcomed with open
arms. Items are no longer placed in aisles with other merchandise of the same
category; they are now sporadically placed throughout the warehouse. This means
that a warehouse shelf will not have 10 shoulder pads stacked together, but,
for example, a shoulder pad, a tee shirt, a set of elbow pads and a puck.
Obviously, this helps with cycle counts and inventory tasks,
as well. It was a concept that Blackmore and his team developed in the
beginning stages of redeveloping WMS.
 |
| Blackmore (far right) at the RES Summit (Courtesy RIS News) |
“One of the things that came up early on was why do we need to keep everything organized
by category?” he said. “There are some exceptions -- sticks need specific
types of bins to hold sticks. When it came to pads and more fluid items, there
were really no compelling reasons to keep those together. When we ran some
tests, which included how long it took to take certain items out and put stuff
back in, it was amazing how different and more simpler it was to find a certain
item when it was mixed with other items that weren’t bred from the same cloth.
If you have 10 pads in a bin of different sizes, you had to go pick through and
be very conscious of what you’re looking for. But if you have a shin pad,
shoulder pad and a helmet but you only need the shoulder pad, you can hone in
on one of the items of the bunch and grab it.”
The outside-of-the-box thinking instantly benefited the
warehouse crew, which includes shipping supervisor Michael Wilmas.
“It’s hard to quantify what these changes have meant to the
company,” he said. “It’s made us faster in pulling customer orders and made a
supremely efficient warehouse. We are far beyond from where we were to where we
are now. It’s been a tremendous addition.”
It’s not just the warehouse crew that benefits from the
changes, either.
“Chaos binning has given way to wave picking, which allows
team members to pick multiple items within the same aisle,” said E-commerce marketing
manager Jon Lynch. “It’s sped up transfers and sent product to the stores and
directly to the customers even quicker.”
Redirecting
the Kudos
Despite the award nomination and all of the praise coming
from his peers, Blackmore is the last person to take full credit for the
advancements to WMS.
He recognizes the progress in the industry set forth by
leaders Amazon, Zappos and, from a technological standpoint, Newegg.com. He also defers much of the workload to his
team of coders, programmers and designers, while suggesting that Total Hockey’s
business group is the outfit that
comes through with solid ideas to get the creative engine started.
There is one new aspect, though, which Blackmore was proud
to accept the accolades.
Transferring product from warehouse to store and vice versa
is now heavily monitored through tracking of shipments. Before, an item might
be placed on a truck and sent to a corresponding store with one employee
completing the transfer from his computer. Now, Blackmore has installed a more
advanced tracking system that allows anyone within the company to not only see
that an item is getting transferred, but where it is en route and if it has
been officially received by the final destination.
Think of when you order something through Amazon; most
times, you can track your incoming package as it passes through multiple
shipping facilities, all the way until it arrives at your front door. This is
all made possible by multiple scan points
throughout the process, which, in Total Hockey’s methods, can be seen by the
shipper and receiver. For example, Mike
in St. Louis’ shipping department and Sophia in one of the Chicago stores can
use WMS to track an order's progress.
“Through various positions I’ve held over the years, this
idea came from my own experiences and tribulations I’ve had to deal with,” said
Blackmore. “One of the things that I really learned through those processes was
in order to know where your merchandise is, you have to have accountability for
that merchandise.”
A 20/20
Vision
Although these advancements have already earned Blackmore a
prestigious nomination, the future is even brighter for the company founded in
1998.
On the docket for Blackmore and his team is radio-frequency
identification (RFID) and mobile point-of-sale (POS).
RFID tags allow retailers to embed chips into product and
can be monitored from a fairly large distance. This would assist during
inventory management and would be beneficial with theft monitoring.
Mobile POS is a system that, unlike WMS, directly affects
the customer in the retail store.
“It’s going to affect the way we interact with the customers,”
Blackmore said. “Right now, retail stores are very centric around the cash
register. If you go to the Apple Store and other similar places, employees
carry around devices with them. That’s kind of the vision for us, too. We’d
like to bring that technology to Total Hockey and be able to work with
customers anywhere in the store. At some point, we’d like to have it where
customers can check themselves out.
“The experience five years from now in our stores with
Mobile POS will be significantly different than it is now. We’ll be engaged
with the customers where the merchandise is and be able to show them what we
need to show them.”
For the present, though, Total Hockey employees are
benefiting from the tech team’s recent roll out. Blackmore, who describes
himself as internally motivated, will
continue to break ground on upgrades to WMS and other Total Hockey automation.
And he’ll do it without asking for more praise.
“I’m not in this business for any type of fame or fortune,”
he said. “Computers and technology are my passion. I would be doing this in a
basement somewhere, whether I was getting paid to do it or not. The fact that I
get to do something that I love for my job is something that most people can’t
say they do.”
Thanks to Blackmore’s continued efforts, his mindset might
now be shared by the 500-plus employees at Total Hockey.
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