Case Study – Ceramics and Tiles industries

About the client

One of the leading manufacturers of the ceramics brand, the client has multiple categories like tiles, sanitaryware and many more. Product portfolio for the client includes Vitrified Tiles, Bathroom Tiles, Kitchen Tiles, Fullbody Tiles, Outdoor Tiles, Wall Tiles and Sanitaryware.

Problem Statement

Client’s requirement was to manage inventory and operations in the warehouse attached to each of the three production units located in Gujarat. Apart from the production warehouses, Client also required the WMS to handle operations at the warehouse located in Maharashtra. Thus, the two warehouse locations needed to have different processes configured within the solution. Discrepancy of grade/quality was found in SAP and Physical Stock at the time of manual production entry. One of their main concerns was lack of visibility of inventory in the warehouses. Apart from visibility of overall inventory in the warehouses, they were not able to track inventory levels for a specific grade/quality and batch combination. This is a crucial aspect in ceramics industry as only one grade and batch combination for an SKU should be sent to the customer to avoid variations in tiles.

Solution

PALMS supports multi-warehouse operations and has feature to implement different workflows for different processes. The two processes implemented were: Receiving of finished goods directly from production line to Gujarat warehouses and receiving of finished goods in Maharashtra warehouse from Gujarat. PALMS gave visibility regarding stock levels in all four warehouses. Palletization using Handy PALMS enabled the user to palletize same item – batch – grade combinations in a pallet. This made tracking and picking of pallet efficient. PALMS provides an option to allocate materials based on batch attributes specified in a customer order to dispatch the requested batch-grade combination of SKU. PALMS was integrated with SAP to maintain accurate stock levels in both systems. A flow was developed specifically for Client for correcting any discrepancies in grade of tiles and sending updated information to SAP. Additionally, PALMS was integrated with Transport Management System at Maharashtra warehouse for vehicle planning.

Client has been successfully running warehouse operations on PALMS since past 3 years.