Superday Series: Unbox Tribe
Gousto’s Unbox tribe is responsible for getting boxes into customers’ homes. The tribe’s mission is to create an unrivalled unboxing experience with impeccable design, quality, and cutting-edge sustainability to continue pleasing customers as the company grows.
One of the primary objectives for Unbox in 2023 has been scaling operations, with particular attention given to the Warrington factory. The goal was to increase capacity to handle 87,000 boxes efficiently. By expanding operations in Warrington, Gousto can better serve our customers and enhance overall productivity.
From scaling operations to achieving project milestones, the Unbox Superday presentation covered the key initiatives and projects that have driven the team forward this year.
The team also won the award for the best Superday presentation, thanks to some interactive videos and some very entertaining slides!
Measurement and Reporting
The Pickline domain is responsible for all algorithms and processes related to the setup and completion of orders passing through the entire picking process and collecting all its ingredients. Pick Face Optimisation (PFO) is the name of the process which determines how recipes and ingredients are split across pickfaces in a given factory.
As you can see in the image above, in order to estimate the capacity at Warrington, several factors must be taken into consideration, from Picks Per Box and Picks Per Hour Per Station, to Supply Chain, Availability and Labour Cost.
In their Superday presentation, the Unbox team focused on the Box Present & Pickable criteria, which ensures that a Gousto box is ready and waiting in front of the picker. The Pickline team provided a useful pub analogy to explain this: the box is like a waiter in a bar, trying to navigate several tables of demanding customers in as little time as possible. The waiter must find the most efficient route around the pub in order to satisfy more customers and do a better job.
Box Present has recently been improved by making ORA (the Order Routing Algorithm) stockaware. ORA decides which routes the box (or bartender!) should take, in as close to real time as possible, based on two metrics:
- Station visits: how many stations does each box have to visit to get the ingredients it needs?
- Workload balance: are boxes hitting stations evenly, or are there bottlenecks with a few stations handling many picks?
Once ORA has determined the best order routing, it will pass this information onto the factories, along with the PFO solution and any substitutions, at which point the factories can lay out ingredients ready to pick.
This system reduces the number of short picks and gives the team more time to adapt to shortages and find substitutions.
The team have also improved Box Present by increasing the number of available pickslots. The use of simulation showed that increasing the number of pickslots at a station would have a positive effect on station visits, box present and therefore station throughput. By increasing the number of pickslots, more SKUs can be picked at one station.
As our future propositions change and more recipes are added to the menu, increasing the number of SKUs required, the number of station visits should still stay low, thanks to this newly improved tool.
Moreover, picking errors have reduced by 1% in the last few months. The team tracks boxes at each station and also checks the number of picks carried out by each box.
Other work streams have been improved in 2023, from asset reliability to Supply Chain and Dispatch Rate. In the next few months, Unbox will conduct a discovery into ORA, improve the substitution pipeline by moving them earlier in the process, and carry out a further deep dive into Box Present in order to hit the 85% goal.
Operations
The team at Warrington showed us a fascinating insight into life in the factory with a flyby video of a box collecting SKUs from the different picking stations.
Availability
What is availability? It considers all the systems that Gousto uses to deliver a box to a customer, how long they’re available, and whether or not they’re functioning as they are supposed to. It considers both planned and unplanned changes, and not only checks that a system is ‘up and running’ but that it’s running as expected.
- Used to simply measure the availability of all the systems that make up the overall tech solutions that allows the team at Warrington to receive a customer order, process and ship the box
- Lots of system make up the tech solution, we measure availability of them all
Availability at Gousto refers to Factory, Mechanical and Systems availability. There is a formula which measures the availability of all the systems that make up the overall Tech solutions that allow the team at Warrington to receive a customer’s order, process and shop the box. The team publishes their performance on a daily and weekly basis against agreed availability targets.
Availability helps the team to determine how our solutions are performing, mitigate risks, and estimate the financial impact of any downtime. It is crucial for ensuring that we continue to delight every customer.
For example, the target availability is 99.4%, which means only 1 hour and 29 seconds of downtime. We set a very high bar!
Warehouse Domain: Decant and Tote Flow
Another of the streams that feeds into Unbox’s end-game formula is ensuring that they have stock present for the pickers, to ensure boxes are able to allocate and be picked. This is where decant and tote flow come in.
After stock arrives from the supplier, it needs to be transferred into blue plastic totes, which are known as decant. These totes are then relocated by the conveyor network into the pick tower. The tote will be routed to a pick slot for a picker to pick into customer boxes or to reserve as storage until it is needed. This journey from decant to the pick tower is our tote flow. Decant and tote flow are key steps in ensuring stock will be present in pick stations.
How do we increase decant efficiency? One way is by reducing the time spent counting items. Previously decant operatives had to count every item they put into totes, which was time consuming. The Pakchois squad have recently introduced a new instruction on the decant GUIs to ask operatives to “just tip” a full supplier case into the tote and to get the domain work to match tote quantities to supplier quantities where possible. As a result of this, they saw a 7 second reduction in the average decant time.
Alongside the great work to reduce counting, several teams have been collaborating to unlock further efficiencies and provide the tools to enable the fastest decant rate per tote. Recent progress includes reports to enable performance management, equipment for handling slow SKUs, packaging changes, and new tools to reduce time spent on activities such as waste handling.
A smooth flow of totes into and out of the pick tower is critical to sustaining the pick operation. The more totes on the move, the greater the risk of congestion. This can slow down production and, in the worst cases, leads to disappointment for our customers through missing ingredients or delayed boxes.
Earlier this year, tote congestion re-surfaced as a key bottleneck at Warrington. The warehouse domain quickly pivoted to identify how they could reduce totes in the system, while supporting both order volume scaling and ensuring we could spread stock across all pick stations. It became clear that for totes were being filled well below their physical capacity for many SKUs, leading to inefficient use of the conveyors.
By working closely with operations on a weekly basis, the team designed a process to maximise tote fill while protecting stock spread for each SKU. They were able to propose revised tote fills and considerably reduce the number decanted each week.
Warehouse Improvements
The Warehouse domain play a key role in ensuring that stock is present for pickers. This actually begins earlier in the Warehouse with picking the stock from the freezer, intake, or storage.
The process for picking stock was previously done by hand, resulting in errors, stock accuracy degradation, mis-rotation, and inefficient planning. The team used to spend 14 hours per week planning frozen stock movement, because there was no direction to the stock that expired first.
Now, they use automated task generation to direct users to stock and lead to faster picking, as well as optimised stock selection which considers expiry dates and puts the stock in priority order, and scan validation to ensure that the correct stock is being picked. As a result of these changes, there has been a 50% reduction in time taken to pick a pallet of stock and a 7% increase in stock accuracy in the freezer, reducing the risk of stock shortages.
Colleagues in the Pakchois and Peppers squads have been working to improve Decant visibility, collaborating with the Operations team to develop a suite of reports focused on the day-to-day and performance monitoring. There is a clear visual warehouse which shows the status of each location, as well as another report with deep insights on each decant station. There are also new and improved performance dashboards which allow the team to track the performance of stations as well as each individual pallet decanted there.
Finally, the team has introduced a new replenishment simulator to allow testing of improvements to dynamic replenishment and how it allocates storage space. It controls the movement of stock and will enable the team to optimise across SKUs.
Conclusion
In 2023, Unbox has been prioritising operational efficiency, scalability, and project completion to achieve their objectives. By focusing on initiatives such as Box Present & Pickable (BPP) improvements, Picks Per Hour (PPH) enhancements, and streamlined processes like ORA Stockaware, Gousto continues to improve operations.
It’s onwards and upwards for Unbox!
With thanks to everyone in the Choice tribe and all who contributed to this Superday presentation
