Introduction:

Hiram Miller Company was nation’s leading office products supplier with 20 distribution centers, 12 retailers and two paper merchant businesses. The items in the warehouse vary in shape, size and weight in order to manage the merchandise efficiently the company needs to come up with strategies to manage their inventory better as their current warehouses don’t have sufficient space to store all the merchandize efficiently. Their current warehouses are incompetent and have scarce resources such as lower ceilings, fewer docks, few elevators and the warehouses are not well equipped with technology. They have been unable to accommodate 21st century supply chain function due to obsolete warehousing operations and space constraints that could potentially obstruct their future sales growth.

Supporting Evidence:

The division faced inadequacies in serving $33 million in sales from this warehouse. The main warehouse was built in 1950’s before establishment of trailers and trucks. It had weak ceiling and no mechanized material handling equipment. According to surveys service was the second most important in deciding upon an office supply vendor, defined by most as 24- hour delivery and at least a 90% fill rate. This warehouse was not only facing challenges to meet the present customer needs alone, but also warehouse capacity constraints. Warehouse at Carpenter Street had only two docks, two forklifts and weak floors. It was shedding layers of paint, plaster and dirt on workers. The warehouses had weak floors due to which handling and stocking of merchandise was done by hand, the floors didn’t support use of forklifts. The warehouses had limited elevators to move merchandize; layout of the warehouse was terrible moreover it had six receiving and shipping docks that led to violating traffic rules. The dock didn’t have much space to drop trailers and