Executive Summary

GSCMA 1st Trek MSU Food Stores, MSU University Stores, MSU Packaging School
By Andrien Zanier The first Fall 2013 Trek was held on 11/1 /13 at three unique facilities at MSU: the Food Stores complex, the University Stores Distribution Center, and the Packaging School R&D laboratories. The Food Stores tour guide was Don Swanson (Services Manager) who gave us a complete tour of the food tasting room, the kitchens (including the gigantic bakery), the cold storage room and the freezer room - that has a constant temperature of -7 Fahrenheit (we were in there for 10 minutes, cold!) To counter this extremely low temperature drawback, every shelf has a highly visible identification tag to help the employees in their tasks.
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materials such as ethyl alcohol, acetone, spray paint cans and lithium batteries.

Hazardous Materials An interesting high-light was the hazmat room that is built as a boom-room with 3 strong walls and 1 weak wall (in case of a violent explosion of the chemicals, the weak wall will collapse and decrease the chances of employee injury). The Packaging School tour guide was Dr. Dianna Twede (Professor) who gave a presentation on the complexities associated with all types of packages and how inter-related the Packaging and SCM industries really are. For the Packaging Professionals the importance of a well designed and built package is obvious: to help the contents of the package to remain intact. For the Logistics Professionals the important aspect is mainly one: to correctly transport and deliver the package itself as fast as possible, without too much focus on whats exactly inside the package (sort of gets you thinking!). Most of the laboratories were available for visiting and the best demonstration of the importance of a strong package was shown with the sugar-package drop test conducted in loco by a PhD student.

Freezer Room The warehouse utilizes a state-of-the-art Voice & Pack Dematic system for picking food items that allow the employees to have their hands free at all times, avoiding human errors when fulfilling orders. The bakery uses tower ovens that are the size of an elevator cabin and can bake hundreds of cookies or dozens of pies at the same time, improving quantity output performance. An interesting fact is that the employees of the bakery arrive at 2am every day!

Tower Ovens Although the main building dates back to 1964, it is still incredibly large for modern standards, handling up to 5000 SKUs in its inventory and possessing a full-fledged loading dock that can operate 4 trucks simultaneously.

Drop Test Machine A Drop Test Machine is comprised of a huge steel deck, industrial grade powerful hydraulics and a computer controlled trigger system. The platform with the item is raised and violently releases the deck that smashes the package by using the force of gravity, simulating a package being dropped on the floor (that was a loud bang!). The result was that the sugar-package cracked at the seam, demonstrating that perhaps the use of a stronger adhesive could have made the package stronger. Another packaging test device is the Hertz Frequency Machine that simulates the frequency band that is created inside a cargo truck bed and can violently burst packages and goods alike. A computer controlled hydraulics base vibrates until a certain degree of resonance is reached that can compromise the stability of a load of goods up to the point an unsafe condition is generated. Data feedback can be analyzed and afterwards used to develop new package solutions.

Loading Docks The materials of the pallets used include plastic variations, IPPC certified wood (for heavy items such as canned goods) and steel frames with rollers (for smaller and delicate items such as bread loaves - the smaller pallets can be fitted in most MSU building elevators, allowing a wide range of flexible delivery options such as the Residence Halls). The forklifts and electric carts are all adapted with extreme climate components to prevent the electric motors from condensation and short-circuit damages when entering and exiting the cold storage areas. The University Stores tour guide was Susan Fennel (Logistics/Operations Supervisor) who demonstrated how the staging area works for all the direct-procured goods. Susan explained that most orders can be fulfilled on the same day that they are generated by the customer online purchasing system. The operations team is working on improving the internal tracking system because of the wide range of items that are inbound and outbound of the distribution center such as: agricultural field air-drones, bins of human bones (for scientific research purposes, wow!) and various hazardous

Hertz Frequency Machine All-in-all this trek was very interactive from a student point-of-view and allowed the participants to gain a better understanding of the different SCM aspects right here on MSU grounds!

MSU Broad GSCMA 2013