Kolok: floor labour halved and 99.8% stock accuracy on Manhattan WMS

Printer and office supplies distribution · South Africa and Namibia · Manhattan WMS

Kolok, one of the largest printer supplies distributors in Africa, replaced a manual, card-based stock-control system with Manhattan's warehouse management system, implemented with Supply Chain Junction, and then worked with SCJ to keep improving its warehouse.

At a glance

• 50% smaller floor warehouse labour complement
• 99.8% stock accuracy, up from below 50%
• 80% less stock shrinkage

The challenge

Kolok serves resellers across South Africa, Botswana, Lesotho, Eswatini, Namibia, Angola and Mozambique from a network of six distribution centres in South Africa and one in Namibia. As transaction volumes grew, its manual, card-based stock-control system could not keep up. Deliveries sometimes took four to five days to unload, and once stock was put away it was hard to find. Stock accuracy was below 50%, which hurt supplier relationships and made it hard to promise delivery when an order was taken.

What Kolok and SCJ did

• Went live in six months. Kolok chose Manhattan's warehouse management system and engaged Supply Chain Junction to lead the implementation. The WMS and Kolok's new Microsoft Dynamics AX ERP went live on the same day.
• Kept it standard. On SCJ's advice Kolok ran the software as designed rather than modifying it, which kept upgrades simple.
• Built in-house ownership. Starting with little WMS experience, the Kolok team learned to own configuration and process changes in the WMS themselves.
• Kept improving. Once the first phase had bedded down, Kolok asked SCJ to benchmark its distribution processes and find more. Together they introduced perpetual counting, a single-step pick, pack and weight check, and batch picking of customer orders.

"Supply Chain Junction has helped us in identifying and implementing key processes to optimise our warehousing and distribution, our relationship has gone from service provider to trusted partner."

— Mohammed Ebrahim, Operations Director, Kolok

Results

• Floor warehouse labour complement reduced by 50%
• Stock accuracy from below 50% to 99.8% within four years
• Stock shrinkage down 80%
• 16+ containers received and put away a day, where one container used to take up to five days
• Daily order volumes up by around 30%
• Orders processed from start to finish in under 15 minutes
• Perpetual counts: no more closing the warehouse for a stock take, and a full facility count in under half a day
• 99% on-time delivery, with orders arriving the same day or within 12 hours of the next day, where they used to take three to four days

"My advice for those considering adopting a WMS is to accept SCJ's advice to keep it simple and not complicate the process."

— Mohammed Ebrahim, Kolok

About Supply Chain Junction

Supply Chain Junction is Manhattan Associates' GeoPartner for Africa and the Middle East, with over 90 implementations in the GCC and Africa and teams in South Africa, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Supply Chain Junction was founded in 2002 and has delivered Manhattan across Africa and the Middle East since 2006.

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