The design of a labeling process for the DFS production site Seclin – 2010.PEL.7504 vi
Summary
The production site Seclin, in France, produces the majority of the enzymes for DSM Food Specialties (DFS). DFS is an independent business unit of the multinational DSM and serves hundreds of customers all over the world. These customers have varying requirements for product labels and therefore the labeling process of Seclin must be able to respond to that. Besides these customer specific requests, the product label information is also constantly changing because of extended expiry dates or product re-allocation (i.e. a specific product is changed to another identical product with a different name). This requires a flexible labeling process.
The current label-to-stock (LTS) process however, is increasingly inefficient because of secondary labeling activities. That means; a considerable segment of the products are labeled after production and a second time in the warehouse because of; non standard label requests, extended expiry date, product re-allocation or in-sourced products. Also, the labeling process is poorly adaptable to changes (in requirements), struggles to meet DFS strategy regarding customer intimacy and lags industry trends. Secondary label activities are not taken into account in planning, leading to peak workloads in warehousing and hidden costs. Also there is no clear ownership of the labeling process and guidelines are lacking, resulting in obscurities in solving these problems.
The goal of this research is to design a labeling process for the DFS production site Seclin which efficiently meets customer and legislation requirements in a controlled way. This involves three sub assignments: 1) Restructure the labeling process in a way that non standard labels can be applied efficiently. 2) Define a rulebook which states the guidelines in non standard label content. 3) Define roles and responsibilities.
A functional design is constructed that in the first place is flexible and secondly efficient. Flexibility is obtained by performing labeling after the CODP resulting in a label-to-order (LTO) process. In this situation, all information is assigned to a product after an order has entered the system. This way the most up to date information is applied on the label resulting in total label flexibility. However, every product would still require a basic marking after production because of internal traceability and a final product label in the warehouse. This means duplicate sacrifices and is therefore not efficient. Besides this the warehouse has insufficient capacity to label all products (app. half a million per year). Also the delivery leadtime would increase for all products. Therefore the efficiency is improved by performing LTS for that segment of the product portfolio where possible, resulting in a segmented-label-to-order (SLTO) process. In the SLTO process, a percentage of marked products is calculated for each SKU. This percentage of marked products then indicates the segment of a specific SKU that require LTO. Subsequently, the standard label content is adjusted in order to cover more customer requests. This way more products can be labeled immediately after production, improving the efficiency. After thoroughly investigating the label content requirements, it is decided to include a GS1 barcode, the new GHS warning symbol and additional Brazilian legislation requirements.
The design of a labeling process for the DFS production site Seclin – 2010.PEL.7504 vii The functional design is used to define Roles and responsibilities in order to clarify the ownership in the different functions of the labeling process and to ensure the controllability. These roles and responsibilities are depicted in a RASCI model.
The SLTO process is flexible where required and efficient where possible. It is much more flexible than the current labeling process and is able to handle five times more non standard label requests, with much lower operating costs. Also implementing the SLTO process is relatively fast and cheap. The ERP system knows exactly what products require LTO and what not and can take this into account in the logistic planning, resulting in drastically less peak workloads in the warehouse and better cost allocations. The clear roles and responsibilities will make sure that the SLTO process is executed properly now and in the future.
It is recommended to investigate other product groups of DFS as well. This research focuses on Enzymes only, but during the project it became clear that other departments face the same problems.
