CH Robinson Case Study
The Customer
Headquartered in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, C.H. Robinson is an industry leader in Retail Consolidation in addition to many other supply chain optimization solutions. They specialize in helping retail customers fill case and pallet level orders from a total of five sites across the country. Order Consolidation is just one of many logistics problems that they help customers solve using their global reach, deep industry knowledge, innovative technology, and extensive transportation network.
The Challenge
C.H. Robinson was searching for a solution to their rising labor costs. The organization’s Warehouse Excellence team was focused on improving several areas to accomplish this goal including:
• Real-time and accurate workforce performance reporting
• Formalized and effective coaching capabilities
• Support continuous improvement initiatives through business intelligence data
C.H. Robinson determined that the addition of Labor Management System would provide them with the management tools, real-time visibility, and data analytics to accomplish this goal. Additionally, it was critical for C.H. Robinson to find an experienced Labor vendor that not only had tier one level software but had the engineering and execution experience to successfully support their Warehouse Excellence team.
The Solution
C.H. Robinson determined that partnering with TZA to implement its ProTrack Labor Management System would provide the real-time visibility, performance management tools, a formalized coaching platform and business intelligence reporting they required. They also leveraged TZA’s 40 years of labor consulting and engineering experience to conduct Lean analysis, refine their SOP’s, develop precise engineered labor standards, and facilitate leadership training. C.H. Robinson and TZA partnered during the implementation on a well-defined change management plan, which included all levels of the organization, to ensure the project was successful. The entire project including program design, ProTrack integration and configuration, SOP and performance metrics engineering, program training and go-live support took 4 months to complete.
Distribution Manager, Nick Corbolotti, could not have been more impressed with how the project implementation went and how well his team embraced the performance management culture. In fact, when discussing the pilot project at their Plainfield, IN facility, he said, “I’ve been a part of a lot of LMS implementation projects in the past, and this was the smoothest, by far!”
Senior Manager – Industrial Engineering, Sudarshan Ravi, was also incredibly pleased with how the implementation went. He also said, “The data analytics offered by ProTrack makes it easy on operations to take actionable steps.”
The Results
Within the 3 months after Go Live, the C.H. Robinson operations team, effectively using ProTrack labor management system, has increased performance by almost 10%. Additionally, performance coaching, non-performance-based employee engagements and effective use of ProTrack operational data has led to identifying multiple continuous improvement projects.
It is anticipated that these continuous improvement projects will add significantly to continually driving down operational costs while improving C.H. Robinson’s service levels.
The higher engagement and emphasis on using real-time operational data to remove productivity barriers has, in turn, had a positive impact on culture and retention. C.H. Robinson’s pilot site is on pace to reduce annual labor spend by approximately $450K and realize a 7 month return on investment.
The Future
The team at C.H. Robinson is continuing to roll out their Warehouse Excellence Program at all their sites and have decided to make ProTrack the cornerstone of their high-performance culture and TZA their partner of choice for their Labor Management System journey going forward. They have seen enormous success at their first site and are looking forward to keeping that momentum into the future.
