Bucket Brigades at Revco Drug Stores, Inc Now CVS

One implementation of bucket brigades reported in [6] was at the national distribution center of Revco in Knoxville, TN. Prior to bucket brigades, Revco faced productivity issues because of its reliance on temporary labor and on overtime during peak periods. Revco used a zonepicking system in which the pick line was partitioned into areas based on the assumption of identical workers but, given their employee experience mix, the actual pick rates of its workers could vary by a factor of three. The result was that the allocations of work were always unequal and the pick lanes were imbalanced the slowest pickers were frustrated at falling behind and the fastest pickers were underutilized. 

The report described in [6] claims that the idea of bucket brigades was explained to the workers in about fifteen minutes one morning. When implemented at Revco s warehouse, bucket brigades reduced work-in-process inventory, which relieved congestion on the conveyor. The reduced congestion and more effective task allocation increased pick rates and accuracy. 

Under the new system, supervisors could monitor the relative progress of different lanes and adjust allocation of workers to keep the lanes coordinated (to reduce sorting downstream). Bucket brigades simplified the shifting of workers from a fast lane to a slow one because there is no need to redefine zones. The research measured a 34% increase in pick rates at Revco when they shifted to a bucket-brigade-based task allocation. 

The apphcation of bucket brigades at Revco su ests that even after the warehouse location and layout are defined, there continue to be opportunities to improve performance by adjusting task allocation across workers to become more flexible and demand driven. 

This chapter focused on managing the warehouse and associated flows in a supply chain as well as on the number of different ways flows from suppliers to users can be organized. It established that effective use of the warehouse to decrease supply chain costs often requires careful design and use of crossdocking as an operational tool. Finally, managing order picking can have a big impact on warehouse turn-around time. This chapter thus discussed how the chain structure, the capacity of transportation, and the coordination of material movement and inventory as well as workers in a warehouse improve the competitiveness of the supply chain. 

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