Winter is here, cold weather abounds, and Girl Scout cookies are in plentiful supply. My daughter is a Girl Scout and much to my surprise, I am the cookie mom for the second year in a row. Last year my daughter and I were completely clueless on the process. She thought we were actually baking the cookies and I thought it would be a piece of cake. We were both wrong in our innocent assumptions.

This year I hoped and prayed we’d do better. The Girl Scouts provide a mass of paper and forms, which of course, I conveniently ignore. I have my trusty spreadsheet ready and I calculate all the sales on this only to transfer final figures to the official submission forms due to council. I thought my experiences from last year would help ease the cookie pain this year. What I didn’t expect was that ERP software would actually help me too.

As I sat surrounded by cookies in my SUV and prepared for the journey home from the cookie pick up, I contemplated what lay ahead for me and my trusty cookie companion. With hundred of cases of cookies, the sorting process could take hours. I found myself trailing back to ERP software and what would I do if this was one of our Enterprise 21 software customers? What would I tell them to do if they had out of control operations? I realized I would tell them to get their warehouse in order and to use a computer system to help manage their inefficiencies.

Taking this new thought into account, my mind ran through last year’s troubles and where we went wrong. We brought all the cookies into my garage and literally dumped them in the middle of the floor. We proceeded to do a very weak form of zone picking, where three of us started grabbing cookies for a given order or scout. This zone picking was unstructured and an absolute mess. This was just not the right environment for zone based picking. We had mistakes and confusion and ended up recounting the same order four times to finally get an accurate count.

This year I thought we would start off right. This year we were putting solid warehouse management practices into place. We were going to work smarter, not harder.

Instead of mass chaos like last year, this time we brought all of the cookies into a receiving area and I performed a dock to stock transfer. I defined primary locations for each type of cookie. Then, instead of zone picking like last year, we switched to a pick by order methodology. One by one we selected the cookies and completed an individual girl’s order. Once we completed all the orders, we ran through a quick cycle count to verify the left over boxes matched our anticipated number. Surprisingly enough, it actually worked. With the exception of my husband stealing Tagalongs to satisfy his cookie craving, our cookie inventory tied out. We finished much faster than last year and we had much less angst over the process.

So the moral of my story is this – it doesn’t take a fancy computer system and millions of dollars to improve overall operations. It takes solid business practices and procedures, which in my case, was mimicking my own ERP software.

Rebecca Gill
ERP ETC.