Randy Brough

Profile of Success: Randy Brough, supply chaing manager, Lifeway Greatest initial challenge: Making the distribution center (DC) a core competency for the company. “LifeWay’s DCs were treated as a forgotten part of the organization. … It was basically a necessary evil to be dealt with.” For the first few months, Brough, who joined LifeWay in 1994, and his boss even researched the possibility of outsourcing the entire operation. Plan of action: The long-term costs of outsourcing outweighed the benefits, so Brough and the logistics team implemented the following tactics: 1. Built a better management team. Since 1994, the management staff increased from eight

Here's an efficient way to improve the accuracy of orders shipped from your distribution center (DC): LifeWay, a Nashville-based cataloger of religious books, uses a staff-certification method. Orders gathered by LifeWay's top-performing pickers (called "certified" pickers) are randomly checked only about 45 percent of the time, according to Randy Brough, supply chain manager. Meanwhile, "non-certified" pickers, which include new and lower-performing DC staffers, are checked 100 percent of the time. In this way, says Brough, the overall order-checking process is faster, and quality control is improved.