Why a Warehouse Consultation is Valuable with Chad Boehne

Chad Boehne, Storage Solution’s Director of Material Flow Consulting, discusses the how consultations can be valuable to operations looking to find the best solution for their business and how Storage Solution’s approach differs from others.

Introduction

Chad Boehne, Director of Material Flow Consulting. I’ve been with SSI for two years prior to my current role. I lead all consultations here. I was the Director of Automation Engineering. So, I led all of these solution designs for our clients prior to SS, I have a pretty broad range of experience. I was at Redwood Materials, where I’d led logistics for that startup, which is an EV battery recycler startup. Prior to that, I was at FedEx Supply Chain for almost five years. I led the North American fulfillment operations with customer service for them for the country. So, there are multiple sites there. Prior to that, I spent six years at Amazon.com at five different locations, I had global experience there, everything from inbound to outbound, reverse logistics, you name it. I did it all at Amazon.

Now, when talking about material flow consultations, we have a brochure on our website’s downloads page. But what exactly goes into a consultation?

Yeah, so, we offer three different levels of consultation. They’re called optimize, analyze, and materialize. Optimize is your entry-level, some very high-level conceptualization of offerings. So, let’s say a customer comes to us and they just want to see some ideas that are out there. They want us to look at their floor plan, draw on some high-level sketches of what a future solution could look like, minimal data analysis and high-level ROM costing. The second one is analyze. Analyze is for customers that maybe don’t have data analysts on staff or they’re lacking in their analytics capability. We will crunch all the numbers and essentially show that customer; here’s what your data is telling us: there are 3-to 4 or five different options. Materialize is the highest level of consultation, including significant data analysis and CAD drawings to scale 3D renderings if needed. And again, because we’re vendor agnostic, we will usually show at least two different automated solutions as well as storage solutions, sometimes three. Complex timelines, complex project management schedules, very tight costing, as tight as we can get that they could use for budgetary purposes for, say, an upcoming fiscal year.

To get the most comprehensive data, a tailored approach to a business’s goal or goals is essential. What can they expect cost-wise from a consultation?

So, costing starts at $10,000 for optimize, usually in the 10 to $20,000 range. Analyze is usually in the 20 to $40,000 range and materialize starts at 40,000 and goes however far it needs to go. So, at minimum for optimize, you’re going to get one automation engineer who will come to the site, we will take a bunch of pictures, have a bunch of questions, take a bunch of notes and then you get the output of the optimization. To analyze, in the four to twelve-week range, depending on how much data there is to analyze, that’s going to be generally at least one automation engineer, potentially a senior automation engineer. Again, it just depends on how complex the data is. Also, I will make a site visit there to see how the consultation is going. And then for materialize, we will devote as many resources to materialize as we need to. So, this could be one engineer, three engineers, or whatever the consultation needs, that’s what we will apply to it. The timeline will be anywhere from eight to sixteen weeks. Our solutions engineers would design everything in the consultation, and then we would hand it off to our implementation team for the actual execution of the project.

And that’s all in-house?

All in-house, we handle everything turnkey. For Storage Solutions specifically, when a customer comes first for a consultation, they’ll work with us from beginning to end if they choose to, so we can do everything from the overall solution design, the data analysis, CAD layouts to scale renderings, etc. And then assuming that they decide to move forward with us as the integrator, we will then move it over to our implementation team. Again, just works with the same people that the customer has already been working with. We hit it off to the execution team and we’re going to be hand in hand the entire way throughout the process. There’s no breakdown in communication because it’s all handled in-house.

OK, but why should anyone look into a consultation?

There are a lot of reasons that customers reach out to us. The most common that we run into is “I need to reduce my variable labor cost.” That’s number one. Number two is “I’m out of room. I can’t go any higher or wider. I don’t know how to utilize their cubic capacity better.” #3 would be this is relatively common; “I know we need to automate, but we have no idea where to start. I’ve watched all these YouTube videos, and I’m lost. Can you please help us?” I would say those are the most common that that people reach out to us. There’s a little bit of “I think I know what I want, but I’m not sure. Can you make us road map so we can put it into next year’s budget cycle?” For example, “I don’t need anything implemented this year, but I’m planning for my budget cycle or my fiscal year that starts wherever six months down the road.” And they want a cost, a tight cost, in a timeline. They then need to take that to senior leadership and say here is this automated solution; here is the design; here’s the concept; here’s the overall cost, etc. They can bake that into their fiscal planning and get it approved. I would say a third of our consultations are, “I’m going to put it into our budget cycle for next year, and we’re going to put it out for RFP”, and because we’re also an integrator and we can operate turnkey, we will be included in that RFP process. But then, especially for larger corporations that generally require at least three bids for anything that size, we would bid, plus we’d have a couple of competitors out there to bid.

But is there any benefit for our solution integrator to do a consultation over another business with their own manufactured products?

For us, we’re more about building a long-term partnership than getting a quick sale because we’re vendor-agnostic. We’re not driven by a goal of selling our product over somebody else’s. Even though we’re owned by a huge firm in the intralogistics industry, we’re not forced to sell certain brands. So, when a customer comes to us and says, “Hey, I think I need a goods-to-person solution or a pallet shuttle or what have you, we know all the players in the market. We’ve worked with the majority of them, and we’re going to crunch their data and go back to the customer and say maybe you don’t need this solution; maybe the right solution could be semi-automated, and a lot of customers want a fully automated building with as few people as possible. But then, when we look at the data and show them the options out there, we will tailor it to say, you should probably look at this route based on your data and your ROI needs or your financial requirements. So, I think from our end, where we’re unique is we bring a ton of real-world experience to the table, and we are going to recommend the right solution, not one that we are required to recommend.

How does Storage Solutions conduct consultations differently?

I would say one difference that I’ve seen because I used to be the customer when I was at FedEx and Amazon, I used to work with, and one of the big frustrations I would have as a customer is I would be dealing with a really nice salesperson, but they didn’t have real-world experience, so whenever they would be trying to tell me what I should do with my building, it could get frustrating at times because I can tell that they didn’t actually know what they were talking about. I think one of the things that’s different with Storage Solutions is we took a different approach to who should be providing a consultation, and those people should be very experienced in the operation, like myself. I’ve got over a decade of experience running large-scale operations at the global level. We take a realistic approach to solutions design, we don’t make or draft a solution that just looks great on paper. We deliver solutions that I would be comfortable with as the general manager leading on day one. If I wouldn’t be comfortable leading that building myself, I wouldn’t allow the solution to move forward.

If you have any questions about material flow consultations, whether that’s for your warehouse distribution centers or fulfillment facilities, click here to get started.