Question of the Week
One real peak-season question every week. Straight answers from the GoVia Alliance Group operators — no slides, no jargon, under five minutes.
Episode 6 — What's the inventory shortcut that felt fine in September, but wound up costing you in November?
Fran Worth — Trailers in the yard, set up as locations in the WMS, to keep the building from running over ninety percent capacity. It holds until the product you need sits behind the product you don't. Now you unload a full trailer to reach twenty cartons, and when that stops working you start picking off the dock with no location telling you where anything is.
Byron Howard — Cycle counting stops. The operation falls behind, and the best cycle counters are usually the best operators, so they get moved to cover the floor. Six, eight, twelve weeks pass without counts. The building stays on schedule and nobody pays detention. Then peak arrives with the inventory wrong, fill rates falling, and customer complaints climbing.
Charlie Mangini — Slotting discipline erodes. Someone built an A, B and C strategy and assigned locations to match. Then heavy inbound arrives, people get sloppy in the bulk racks, and A freight goes into a C location. It is accounted for, so nobody flags it. It is just on the fifth tier instead of the floor, and every replenishment in November needs equipment and an operator to go get it.
Episode 5 — What's the last change you'd let into the building before peak, and when did you start saying no?
Byron Howard — The labor model. Sites get behind during peak, overtime climbs, and the instinct is to add temporary labor or pull people from other departments. Overtime running eighteen to twenty-eight percent is too high, but it beats bringing in people who do not know the operation. Do that and your best performers stop producing and become trainers instead.
Fran Worth — New technology. Senior leaders get pitched automation and integrations all year, and the pull to install something that closes a labor gap is strong. But a new system needs training and an in-house expert, and the vendor cannot tell you how your building will use it. Those are first and second quarter projects. Not third, and never fourth.
Charlie Mangini — Standard operating procedures. In retail distribution the late-summer work is finalizing procedures across facilities that each hit different problems. My deadline was the end of August, and September was the no. Change management is all hands, and changing things repeatedly creates frustration and misunderstanding. Button up the procedures, then spend the time training, so the team can train the seasonals as they arrive.
Episode 4 — Somebody rolled out a change in your building and it just wouldn't stick. What went wrong?
Byron Howard — Start with whether it was mission critical, whether it was led from the top, and whether frontline leadership understood why it mattered and how to lead it. Change holds when the leadership team is unified, the message is consistent, and every one of them is committed to delivering it. When it reads as the flavor of the month instead of where the organization is going, it falls apart.
Fran Worth — It usually starts at the top, or with a customer requirement, and then the people who have to execute it are never properly informed. What gets lost at every size and scope is the discipline in communication and the discipline in execution. If associates and their frontline leaders are not given documented steps, updated SOPs, timelines, and named owners, it will not take.
Charlie Mangini — Most leaders are wired to fix everything at once, and the real variable is how many changes land at the same time. Even a bad process is a process people know how to run, and replacing it creates anxiety. Prioritize. Take the biggest rocks first and work down, and accept that not everything gets solved this year. Trying to eat the elephant in one bite is how change dies.
Episode 3 — A key leader leaves unexpectedly. What's the first thing that starts to slip?
Episode 2 — What was always in the wrong place?
Episode 1 — What's the inventory problem you'd always want fixed first?