Royal Home Fashions, Inc.

by: Doug Kahn, Royal Home Fashions Inc. and Jeff Arnold, H.B. Maynard and Company Inc.

Royal Home Fashions, Inc., is the manufacturing arm of Croscill Home Fashions, a premier bedding/bath/linen products supplier. Royal currently has four manufacturing plants and a 330,000 square foot distribution center in North Carolina. Providing everything from comforters and sheets to wallpaper to curtains, Royal provides a bed/bath ensemble which is top-of-the line. In February 1997, Royal asked H.B. Maynard and Co., Inc. to conduct a productivity audit in it's highly automated Henderson, NC distribution center. To increase the productivity of the DC and reward the associates therein, Royal contracted Maynard to provide engineered work standards for the entire DC with the intent of later using the standards for the DC group incentive plan. Maynard consultants used MOST for Windows to measure the work. President and C.O.O., Doug Kahn, was concerned about the sensitivity of engineered standards to the highly variable work done in the DC. This great deal of variation forced Maynard to develop time-standards which were highly mix-sensitive. Standards were developed for DC picking, shipping, receiving, replenish/put-away, and returns areas. Distribution Center work content is primarily customer driven, so mix sensitivity is crucial for accurate time-standards. Some Royal customers require pre-ticketing each item within a carton which varies picking time. Other customers require items be packed with their own cartons and labels. Throw in the variations of walking distance, break-pack vs. full-case picking, number of units per carton, and finger vs. face picks, and a variation nightmare is born. Maynard attacked the variation by separating the constant and variable elements of each task. Picking standards include picking and packing a "base" carton as constant. Using a Pareto analysis, Maynard's consultants and Royal's Industrial Engineer determined which variable elements to designate as "adders" to the base carton time. This detail provided a very accurate, mix sensitive approach to measuring carton pick and pack work content. However, it also introduced a maintenance issue. To apply these picking standards, some crucial inputs were necessary. The number of cartons which were pre-ticketed, had packing slips, were catalog, display, or were some specific customer group were needed. Beginning with the end in mind, early in the project Maynard's consultants worked with Royal's MIS department to enhance some of Royal's current reports to contain these crucial inputs. This way, as the standards need updated in the future, Royal's Industrial Engineer can simply run the report which provides the inputs and update the frequencies in the MOST Data Manager. This type of application is also easily adaptable to a higher level, more automated system such as AutoMOST, Maynard's knowledge-based expert system. With a cutting edge front end system such as AutoMOST, Royal's Industrial Engineer can simply double-click an icon which will call out to Royal's input report and automatically update the standards for each area, in seconds. "I'm really excited about what Maynard has done to give us the level of detail we want and an option to make this a completely automated system" says Mr. Kahn.