Personal care manufacturer improves OTIFEF, truck utilisation and warehouse efficiency through Lean Kaizen

Context and Challenges

A leading hygiene and personal care manufacturer supplying retailers across multiple regions was facing low Customer Service Index (OTIFEF), high transport downtime and internal loading delays. The company distributed finished goods from a central site using its own fleet of delivery trucks and regional bulk routes. Key issues identified included:

• Low Customer Service Index (CSI) – overall CSI around 43%, driven by late deliveries and service failures.
• Poor route planning – trucks followed ad-hoc, criss-cross routes, leading to long average trip times (5.5–8+ hours per trip) and high fuel/time wastage.
• High loading time per truck – average of ~35 minutes due to multiple trolley movements, bottlenecks at forklifts/pallet trucks and poor FG store layout.
• Low vehicle availability and utilisation – 18% capacity lost to breakdowns (70% of downtime from a handful of trucks) and a further 40% capacity lost due to poor CBM utilisation and planning.
• Delayed invoicing – large volumes of FG sitting in production areas waiting to be transferred into ERP, causing invoicing delays and wrong entries.
• Imbalanced regional loads – very heavy mid-week dispatches (e.g. 62 loads on Wednesday vs 19 on Monday and 16 on Friday), creating capacity constraints and OTIFEF problems in several regions.

Our Approach

RIBCON led a structured Lean Kaizen programme along the full dispatch value stream:

• Analysed OTIFEF and CSI data by region, day and failure reason to identify high-impact problems.
• Conducted Gemba studies on truck routes, loading operations, maintenance practices, invoicing flows and regional planning.
• Used root cause analysis, time & motion study, spaghetti diagrams and capacity analysis to quantify losses.
• Designed and piloted countermeasures – standard routes, cart trains, transfer areas, TPM/CBM sheets, count-free trolleys and balanced delivery calendars.
• Locked in improvements through standards, visual controls and simple daily/weekly reviews.

Key Strategies Implemented

Route Planning Standards & Turnaround Time Reduction

• Mapped actual routes and average time per truck, highlighting long and overlapping paths for vehicles
• Designed 12 standard city and up-country routes with clear route codes to minimise transport time & delays
• Developed route planning criteria based on area, customer type and size, order frequency, distance vs time and offloading time.
• After multiple trials, implemented the standards; average trip time per vehicle dropped by roughly 1–2 hours, significantly improving truck turnaround and daily drop capacity.

Warehouse Loading Time & FG Store Layout Kaizen

• Identified key causes of long loading time: multiple trolley trips, forklift bottlenecks, poor FG store layout, delays in invoicing and late driver arrivals.
• Introduced Mizusumashi cart trains to bring material in fewer, larger moves.
• Re-designed FG store layout based on product movement frequency and created a transfer area to pre-arrange kits for each truck.
• Result: average loading time per truck reduced from 35 minutes to 18 minutes (nearly 50% reduction).

TPM for Delivery Fleet – Vehicle Availability & Downtime

• Analysed 6-month downtime data by truck and failure mode; 80% of downtime came from suspension issues, body panel damage and starter problems on a few vehicles.
• Implemented Total Productive Maintenance techniques – root cause analysis, condition-based maintenance (CBM), time-based maintenance and simple AM/self-check routines for drivers.
• Dedicated specific trucks to individual drivers to build ownership; trained drivers on daily checks and basic equipment care.
• Applied SMED concepts to workshop repairs – special tools, parallel work, standard job methods and better spare-parts management to reduce repair time.
• Result: average vehicle breakdowns per month reduced from 15 to 1, and fleet capacity utilisation improved markedly.

Count-Free Transfers & Faster Invoicing

• Diagnosed night-shift FG accumulation – high inventory waiting in production areas, slow manual counting, mixed goods and frequent wrong entries, all delaying ERP posting and invoicing.
• Designed special “count-free” trolleys with fixed capacity to eliminate manual counting.
• Created a dedicated transfer area to store night production systematically, separated by SKU.
• Introduced colour coding and barcode scanning on trolleys to prevent system entry errors and speed up goods transfer in ERP.
• Result: about 90% reduction in delayed invoicing due to unavailability of goods in the system.

Regional Load Balancing & Kanban Ordering

• Assessed regional CSI scores and daily load patterns; CSI as low as 18–45% in some regions, with strong mid-week peaks 
• Rebalanced weekly loads by region considering customer demand, agreements, truck availability and loading capacity.
• Implemented Kanban-based ordering for selected high-volume customers to avoid bunching and very large bulk orders.
• After multiple trials, achieved a balanced profile of 36–38 loads per day, and CSI improved from 43% to about 89%.

Results Achieved

Across the Lean supply chain programme, the personal care manufacturer achieved:

• Route & turnaround improvement: Standardised routes and better planning reduced average trip times per truck by roughly 1–2 hours, increasing drops per day and reducing fuel/time wastage.
• Loading time reduction: Loading time per truck cut from 35 minutes to 18 minutes (~50% improvement).
• Fleet reliability gains: Average vehicle breakdowns per month reduced from 15 to 1, recovering capacity previously lost to downtime.
• Invoicing speed & accuracy: Around 90% reduction in delayed invoicing due to unposted goods, with fewer errors through barcode-based count-free transfers.
• Higher service performance: Balanced weekly regional loads and Kanban ordering drove Average CSI up from 43% to ~89%, significantly improving OTIFEF and customer satisfaction.

By applying Lean Kaizen end-to-end—from routing and loading to fleet TPM, material planning—the FMCG personal care company turned a reactive, capacity-constrained supply chain into a more predictable, efficient and customer-focused network.