Continuous Improvement in the Logistics of the Automotive After-Sales Area

Abstract

AbstractGiven the constant growth of companies, the Lean Thinking philosophy and all the methodologies that come from it have become recurrent in the search for solutions for waste minimization, quality assurance, and continuous process improvement. This paper shows the importance of innovation and daily continuous improvement within a team responsible for placing car parts in the African continent. To this end, methods involving process improvement were improved and applied using programming languages; the implementation of a storage system for supply by picking to dealerships in Africa, with the renting of a logistics platform space for the receipt, sorting, and expedition of orders; and also, the implementation of a Dashboard to measure the team's performance using operational key performance indicators. Through daily contact with the operational environment, several problems or opportunities for improvement were identified in the processes of managing the supply of parts to African countries. Temporal expenditure waste in the daily exercise of the functions of the team's employees was reduced by 94% and allowed this process to be automated and not done in a unique way per customer, thus achieving a decrease of 99.8% of temporal employee expenditure. With the second proposal, the implementation of the storage space, the number of sales of car parts increased, with 26% increase in profit margin for the implemented parts picking. Finally, the labeling of targets is expected to lead to an increase in daily continuous improvement. An improvement that has increased considering the time window in which orders are handled.KeywordsContinuous improvementOptimizationSupply chainLogisticsDistributionStorageKPIData base analytics introduction