Facility Design for Omaha Steaks Order Fulfillment Centers

Omaha Steaks International, Inc. (Omaha Steaks) is a food retailer that ships the large majority of its products directly to consumers in insulated coolers chilled with ice. The demand for their products is extremely seasonal, where the vast majority of orders are purchased as gifts for the holidays. Omaha Steaks owns and operates two distribution centers to fulfill these orders, and needed to determine a cost-effective way to improve the ability of these facilities to meet peak demand.

Omaha Steaks contracted Tompkins International (Tompkins), a supply chain consulting and implementation firm, to evaluate and improve the current facility designs implemented in the two Omaha distribution centers. Tompkins in turn contracted SIMCON to simulate the major production and material handling operations within the Omaha Steaks DCs in support of the systems analysis initiative. The facility simulation model was designed to address the following challenges:

• Evaluate the effectiveness of the current equipment configuration
• Determine cost-effective changes to the equipment configuration that could improve capacity
• Identify system bottlenecks and determine how best to resolve them
• Quantify the impact of stretch wrapper downtimes (e.g., roll changeovers)
• Evaluate conveyor congestion at the sorter merge point and upstream of the stretch wrappers