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From Korea to your home
From Korea to your home
I’m sitting here watching my brand new Samsung LCD TV but I’ve never really thought about how this TV got all the way from Korea into my living room. Here’s a little story to show you how. The relationship with Samsung has been going now for just under 10 years. All inbound coming into the UK, Samsung have got something like 600 containers on route, two aircraft in the air, and 150 vehicles on the road. We’ve been active now I think in Thames port for about two years. That’s been a huge area of growth for us. Port-centric is a change in the way people do their logistics. That operation has grown 300% in the last 12 months.
So it’s a huge area of growth for us. So we see this relationship, particularly with our ability to do the shipping and have totally joined up logistics, as being quite a key operation for us and quite a key product development area for us as well. The ship, typically, we’ll be turning the container around from the ship within about four to six hours of arrival. And that product will be going into the warehouse.
A lot of bonuses for being here because it’s minutes to get a container in and out rather than if we’re in Northamptonshire, it’s sort of hours. Whereas here, we can use all port facilities. We can use a shunter and a shunter trailer. So we receive a lot of orders. Have all the order numbers from Samsung. Samsung create the order in their system, it drops into our system. We have a log then of, by delivery date, what’s going where. And then from that, we route the orders. We allocate all of the stock to all of the routes and then the warehouse will take care of the rest, picking and loading.
Logistics organisation, we have 3,000 people in the UK in total, including some at shipping areas. And we have something like 500, 600 vehicles. We cover a variety of operations. We do the brown goods, which are the television sets. We do white goods for Samsung as well. But we also do the mobile phones, handling something like about 20 million units a year on the mobile phones. And in this site here, we’re working about 4 1/2 million units a year going through. And they’re going through to every vestige of the high street, from small, independent electrical retailers right the way up to major, major operators.
So pretty much every time you see a Samsung product in the high street, they’ll have one way been touched by NYK.
My name’s David Miller. I’m the shift operations manager for this distribution centre. The distribution centre is 700,000 square feet, which is approximately six Wembley-sized football pitches. It’s made up of around 100,000 racking locations. The container arrives on site and then a team of between two and three members of staff will tip that container. And then they’ll stack it onto a pallet to a pre-determined height and specification. And then they’ll shrink wrap that pallet and label that pallet. And the details of that pallet are uploaded onto the computer mainframe, then picked up and transported into the warehouse where it’s stored internally in the warehouse for anything from two days up to a period of six months and beyond.
My name’s Sandra. I’m store manager, Corby Oasis Retail Park. When a television leaves a warehouse, it arrives on a lorry. It comes in a stillage. Our delivery assistants unload the stillages. They then put the items away with a system called voice putaway. They call out the catalogue number and the putaway system tells them where the location is for the item to be. A customer will come into store. He or she will look at the browser, choose a television they want. If it’s in store and they want to purchase it, they’ll come to the till, give the girl the catalogue number. She’ll then process it through the till, take their details for the television.
Once the sale goes through, it will produce a picking ticket in the stockroom. Stockroom picker will then pick it, bring it to the collection counter where they’ll call the number, and then the customer will collect it. It will be stamped. And off they go on their journey home.
So there you have it. We’ve seen this TV travel on ships, trucks, forklifts, and ultimately my car to make into my living room. Now I’m going to sit back and watch the football.
Have you ever wondered how a Samsung TV gets from Korea to your home?
Watch the video above, called ‘Life’s Little Luxury’. In the video we track the movement of a Samsung television from its arrival at ThamesPort in the UK to collection from store by the consumer. Note how many forms of transport there are and how many different locations the item is stored in before it is purchased.
Video reproduced by kind permission of the FTA (Freight Transport Association)
Talking point
While you’re watching the video think about the impact the different modes of transport have on the process of moving goods, the environment and then answer the questions below.
- How many different forms of transportation did you see?
- How many different storage points did the television pass through on its way to the consumer’s home from the ship?
This article is from the online course:
Supply Chains in Practice: How Things Get to You
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This article is from the free online
Supply Chains in Practice: How Things Get to You
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