Warehouse Practices: How Do Yours Measure Up?
Lancaster found it especially useful in providing additional inputs for the warehouse system conversion his company is undergoing. Harry gave examples of useful benchmarks for picks/hour, and the impact of case vs. individual picks and dynamic pick routing.
On the upper end of the scale, Floyd Westervelt, director of strategic planning and inventory at Harcourt, directs four warehouses ranging from 375,000 to 600,000 square feet in size, moving approximately 100 million books annually primarily for the school, trade, academic, reference and religion markets. He, too, is enthusiastic about the value of the program for all publishers.
Eugene G. Schwartz is editor at large for ForeWord Reviews, an industry observer and an occasional columnist for Book Business magazine. In an earlier career, he was in the printing business and held production management positions at Random House, Prentice-Hall/Goodyear and CRM Books/Psychology Today. A former PMA (IBPA) board member, he has headed his own publishing consultancy, Consortium House. He is also Co-Founder of Worthy Shorts Inc., a development stage online private press and publication service for professionals as well as an online back office publication service for publishers and associations. He is on the Publishing Business Conference and Expo Advisory Board.