Operational Analysis

In-Depth Data Analysis Drives Innovation

At SEC Storage, customer data is the lifeblood of our organisation and through its in-depth analysis, we are able to design and implement intelligent warehouse storage solutions that provide real innovation with long term operational benefits and attractive ROI.

Operational Analysis is a vital stage of working together with a customer where we gather and analyse significant amounts of a customer’s operational data to assess both the current situation and determine growth strategies to ensure our warehouse storage solution meets the required criteria and will future-proof the business for expansion.

Our Operational Analysis process is critical in order to fully understand current processes, product type and stock volumes, existing storage capacity as well as throughput pinch points and pick issues. Once this data has been gathered and put through our bespoke analytics and simulation tools, we are ultimately able to provide an accurate overview of the existing efficiency levels within a warehouse storage facility and design and install the optimal storage solution to meet both existing and future requirements.

The key benefits of in-depth and strategic Operational Analysis to customers is that by processing huge amounts of operational data, we can assess and thereby design a highly efficient warehouse storage solution that will demonstrate both the operational outcome and the expected ROI.

Customer Project:

For our customer RAJA UK, we undertook detailed data analysis of their huge product range of over 5000 items, which ultimately led to our design solution increasing pick efficiency by 50% and allows for a further 50% capacity within the warehouse for their planned growth over the next five years.

In-Depth Data Analysis Drives Innovation

To truly drive innovation and design the optimum warehouse solution, we have developed in-depth data analysis processes involving analytics, simulations and digital twinning. Within our data gathering phase we undertake a full audit of the customer’s data in the following areas:

Sales data – which products do they sell, picks per day etc.
SKU data (Stock Keeping Unit) – how many products do they have and what is in stock
Unit volume – size and weight of each SKU

Once we have this information we undertake an in-depth data validation process on each SKU to ensure we have all the necessary information on product type, throughput etc. as well as cubic velocity to identify how much stock is being sold on a weekly or monthly basis. Cubic velocity data combined with unit and SKU volume data is fed into our bespoke software tools to determine how efficient the existing operational processes are, and where improvements can be made. The output from this detailed analysis allows us to determine the optimum storage solution and deliver our proposed solution to the customer using accurate, validated data.

Volumetric analysis Order profile analysis Operational simulation

Volumetric analysis

Here we analyse the length, width and height of each product to then multiply by stock quantity. This is a vital stage as it allows us to identify what is happening within the warehouse. We apply the weight and also check density to ensure the data is accurate and will not skew the results. This will determine the unit volume, volume held in stock and volume being sold. We also undertake aperture optimisation analysis whereby we look at the optimum aperture for each product e.g. pallet location, carton flow etc. taking into account the minimum aperture i.e. the minimum size of area a product will fit into, and what aperture it should be fitted into.

Order profile analysis

For effective order profile analysis, we use the customer’s sales data to help us understand the volume of sales over a period of time and additional peaks e.g. Christmas. We also take into account a customer’s potential growth objectives e.g. we can process the data through our software model with a 20% growth projection, if the client is looking for that objective.

We also identify how often each SKU is being accessed, carrying out bespoke forms of Pareto (80-20 rule) and Classification (aka ABC Analysis, or Banding Analysis). The results of the analysis are able to help us drive efficiency into our design, as well as help us to identify how best to position particular SKUs within our layouts for optimum efficiency.

Operational simulation

Our approach using mathematically proven insights drives our decision-making process. Through our bespoke simulation software tools we are able to replicate a customer’s operational processes. This provides a safe ‘playground’ for us to assess different solutions under various hypotheses and establish the optimal method of tackling the problem, rather than the most obvious.

By carrying out further analyses, such as time-in-motion studies, we are able to create real-time simulations of both the original and conceptual designs, utilising our bespoke modelling package. This enables us to compare the operational performance of both systems and contrast other vital metrics, such as space-utilisation and growth capacity.