Business, Distribution, Balance, Culture, Communication

QBP is the shop behind America’s bicycle shops. Serving more than 5,000 independent retailers across the country, they are the industry’s go-to source for bicycle parts, accessories and apparel. Always expanding their offerings and innovating new programs and services, QBP helps dealers save money, build profits and keep their customers happy.

QBP was looking for improvements, but they were caught in a “catch 22” They needed to improve costs to justify improvements….but how? They reached out to Fortna for their unique approach for assessing and improving distribution operations.

This was not a point solution, salesman assessment. This was one that was done from the perspective of Operations, Finance and IT. The assessment required a different approach than what is normally expected. Fortna reviewed the organization, leadership, processes, material handling, systems and he overall service QBP was providing to their customers.

Management at Quality Bike stated that the improvements “exceeded their stretch goal". A new operations assessment from Fortna led to big cost savings by dramatically increasing their replenishment and manifesting efficiency. Further, a new auto-waving procedure led to enhanced picking capabilities, improving customer service.

Fortna Partnered with Quality Bike to:

Design new operational flows, physical design changes, and system/logic modifications that reduced costs and increased efficiencies

Develop trouble resolution process to expedite staged product

Design and implement new processes for replenishment, picking, manifesting, tote release and collating orders

Reconfigure the manifesting/taping label line by rearranging work content

Reduce the multiple steps in the replenishment process and eliminate staging queues

Eliminate replenishment statuses and conflicting priority tasking

Adjust labor staffing and work shifts to provide better flow between replenishment and picking

Improvement Metrics

Capacity Improvement 20%

Labor Cost Reduction 20 – 35%

Throughput Improvement 30- 35%