Under Construction

Locally-owned Major Brands is Missouri's highest volume distributor of wine and spirits. With offices in St. Louis, Kansas City, Springfield, Columbia and Cape Girardeau, it employs approximately 500 and serves the entire state with an extensive product portfolio that includes the industry's best brands, including Jose Cuervo Tequila, Captain Morgan Spiced Rum, Chivas Regal Scotch, Heineken, Kendall Jackson, Labatt Blue, Red Bull and Vendange, among many others. Its more than 4,300 products are sold and distributed to grocery stores, restaurants, convenience stores -- to basically any establishment holding a liquor license -- throughout the state. On any given day, Major Brand's trucks can be found in route to deliver more than 35,000 bottles and 25,000 cases of product -- that's a total of about 7.5 million bottles and 5.4 million cases per year.

Unfortunately for Major Brands, its paper-based supply chain operations and outdated warehouse equipment just barely supported it through the 2003 Christmas season, when demand for wine and spirits reaches its peak. To optimize all shipping and receiving activities in its high-volume St. Louis-based warehouse, Major Brands needed to deploy a highly adaptable and advanced supply chain execution solution. But first, its unreliable warehouse equipment needed an upgrade.

First Things First
In 2004, Major Brands made an almost $7-million-dollar investment in new material handling and wave control systems. "Our material handling equipment was the largest limitation in the warehouse," says Patrick Quinn, vice president of Administration, Major Brands. "Our operation was working on 13-year-old equipment...we're talking about chewing gum holding this thing together through Christmas season of 2003."

Major Brands tapped the consulting services of CIBER Enterprise Solutions, a division of CIBER Inc., for assistance with the project. CIBER introduced the company to W&H Systems, a material handling contractor that installed FKI Logistex conveyer systems, and to Contech Systems, which provided a wave planning system. The project successfully went live on May 10, 2004.

Supply Chain Intervention
With the assurance of a newly equipped St. Louis facility, Major Brands turned its focus toward priority No. 2: to effectively control, track and gain visibility to the delivery and pick-up process throughout the supply chain.

Since its inception 75 years ago, Major Brands' warehouse was has been, for the most part, manually-run. "Inventory tracking and all updates were done manually," says Quinn. "It was extremely labor intensive and time consuming from a travel and replenishment perspective." For example, Major Brands picks orders four nights per week, so an order that was placed at 5:30 p.m. is promised to the customer the next day. Major Brands typically wraps up the picking process between 4:00 a.m. and 5:00 a.m., with the last two hours consisting of emergency replenishment because no computerized tracking of inventory existed. "We are wasting hours each night doing emergency replenishment, while our picker group is wasting two or more hours per night waiting for replenishment," explains Quinn.

A Fitting Solution
With the help of CIBER once again, Major Brands tapped HighJump Software, a 3M Company, to implement a highly adaptable supply chain execution
solution that would help to orchestrate warehouse operations.

HighJump's Supply Chain Advantage solution empowers Major Brands with robust, standard functionality to meet its requirements today, plus a flexible architecture that will allow it to respond quickly and cost-effectively to future changes in customer requir-ements, seasonal variations in volume and shipments of all sizes. According to Quinn, HighJump's solution touts both a level of custom-ization and bang for your buck that exceeded all other potential solution offerings.
"The suppliers we serve need to know their products are on the shelves as quickly as possible," says Quinn. "High-Jump's strong, flexible software and CIBER's proven implementation expertise in the wine and spirits industry, which we know first hand from a previous project in our St. Louis facility, will effectively meet our complex distribution needs."

Smooth Operations
Major Brands went live with the HighJump solution as planned on June 13, 2005. According to Quinn, users are feeling more comfortable with each passing day as they learn to trust the system and its replenishment capabilities. "Some employees begin to worry that they won't have stock in place when they are ready to pick an item, and then 'boom' there is a forklift with the needed product ready to put in place as they are filling the order," says Quinn. "Bottom line, we are losing our 'fire drill' mentality and seeing more sound and calm production," says Quinn.

Major Brands is already realizing significant benefits such as faster, more accurate turnaround of credits to customers, more accurate placement of product into picking locations, fewer mistakes in fulfillment of orders and, finally, less time being spent on replenishing items during nightly production."We will have the infrastructure necessary to keep pace with high-volume replenish-ments driven by our continued growth,"says Quinn.