Volvo Group и ADP оптимизировали логистику производства кабин грузовиков в Северной Каролине

Volvo Group North America’s cab plant in Kings Mountain, N.C., is a busy operation. It’s where cabs are built for Volvo’s Class 8 heavy-duty trucks, including over-the-road tractors, along with medium-duty trucks used in applications like refuse collection and other city fleets. Those cabs and related components are then moved from Kings Mountain into Volvo Group’s production network in Virginia and Pennsylvania, where they have to arrive on time and in the right sequence to keep production on schedule. Any delay in that flow can affect build plans, customer commitments and the broader truck market that Volvo Group serves. Before Volvo Group acquired the Kings Mountain operation, the site was part of the company’s supplier network. Volvo initially set out to help the supplier improve the flow of materials and get cab production back on track. Starting with an assessment of the logistics operation, Volvo looked at the constraints around the site and what it would take to support better movement in and out of the facility. “We were looking at it as a supplier issue at first,” says Dave Yancey, project manager, production logistics at Volvo Group North America. “They were behind on our cab production, and it was impacting our markets. We sat down to assess the operation and figure out how to fix the logistics flow, including the warehouse capacity we needed to support the site.” Volvo needed a logistics partner that could step in quickly, understand its production environment and help stabilize the warehouse side of the operation. The company had options, but this project didn’t come with months to plan from scratch. Material was already coming in, cab production needed support and the Kings Mountain site was still changing. A. Duie Pyle (ADP) already had a track record with Volvo Group, having provided regional less-than-truckload (LTL) service and value-added logistics support. It also handled cab storage for Volvo Group’s Mack Trucks operation in Macungie, Pa., during an earlier production challenge. “When I was in Macungie, we had a major success story with the ADP team,” Yancey says. “They were storing our cabs at the time and helped us through some production issues. I liked the system they used and thought this would be a perfect model.” What started out as a supplier-support effort became part of a larger transition when Volvo Group acquired the Kings Mountain operation. ADP already had agreements in place with the supplier, so the acquisition added contract complexity at the same time the warehouse had to keep receiving, organizing and moving material. “Once we got the agreements straightened out, it was full speed ahead,” Yancey says. “The attitude from the ADP team was, ‘Tell us what we need to do and we’ll make it happen.’” And with that, Volvo took over a 180,000-square-foot warehouse that still needed the basics before it could fully support the operation. Material had to be received, staged and stored while utilities, equipment and warehouse processes were still being put in place. “It started as just a warehouse with no electricity,” says Yancey. “We used pallet jacks to unload inbound material, and then we started getting power, forklifts, racking, shelving and scanning. It went from being an empty shell to a functioning warehouse.” Working together, Volvo and ADP moved the initial material into the warehouse over roughly nine days, even as new inbound shipments continued to arrive. Once electricity, forklifts and other equipment were in place, the operation started to function more like a true warehouse. By the following spring, ADP and Volvo were adding racking to increase storage capacity and make better use of the space. Yancey says ADP brought in a capable team to help Volvo get through that stretch. “We have a lot of good people inside Volvo Group, but we can also be spread very thin,” Yancey says. “ADP was able to jump through hoops, make things happen and bring in the right people to get this done.” With this project, both Volvo and ADP had to carefully assess where parts belonged inside the warehouse and how quickly those parts needed to move. The operation was organized around truck model and product line, including Class 8 highway trucks, Class 6 trucks and cab-over models. Each had its own parts profile, and some of the existing supplier’s part numbers didn’t follow Volvo’s normal numbering conventions. “This added complexity to the setup,” says Yancey. As production patterns became easier to see, ADP and Volvo used that information to set up more directed putaway and improve turn times. “We set the operation up by model so we could move the fast-moving parts to the front and make our turn time quicker,” Yancey says. “If something didn’t move as often, we could put it deeper in the warehouse.” There were also repacking requirements to consider, since some of the manufacturer’s parts came in on one-way pallets or in packaging that didn’t match its standards. Some pallets also arrived with multiple part numbers or incomplete identification, which made them harder to receive, store and move efficiently. ADP had to move those parts into Volvo-approved containers before they could move through the warehouse and back to the plant. Finally, the new warehouse had to meet Volvo’s compliance requirements, including both ISO and environmental standards. That meant handling cardboard, plastic, wood pallets and other waste streams properly rather than sending everything to a landfill. It added another layer of discipline during the early months, when ADP and Volvo were still improving the physical setup, training new employees and bringing the warehouse up to Volvo’s standards. Going into the project, Volvo’s supplier had its own warehouse system, but ADP could generate inventory reports multiple times a day and help Volvo compare physical inventory against what the plant expected to see. That gave the teams a better handle on inventory accuracy while the operation was still settling in. Volvo and ADP also built key performance indicators (KPIs) around the parts of the operation Yancey wanted to measure, including repacking activity, pallet handling and inbound and outbound volume. The prior day’s KPIs were available by noon the next day, followed by weekly and monthly summaries. That gave the team a way to spot bottlenecks, track warehouse performance and make decisions as the operation matured. With its first wave of inbound material under control, the newly-acquired operation started to find its footing. Power came online within the first few days, forklifts followed and the warehouse began taking on the pieces it needed to function properly, from racking and shelving to scanning. By the following spring, ADP and Volvo were adding more racking to increase storage capacity and make better use of the space. “The facility went from being a shell to a functioning warehouse,” says Yancey. “The early stages of the transition were challenging, but overall, it was a huge turnaround. The warehouse runs extremely well.” For ADP, Volvo’s Kings Mountain project grew out of a relationship built on both execution and trust. Chris Incudine, VP of solutions design at ADP, works closely with Yancey and says Volvo was asking the company to step into an unusual situation: help take over a supplier’s logistics operation because the manufacturer needed help stabilizing it. “If you take the relationship out of it, you basically have a customer asking us to go run their supplier’s operation for them because they had more trust in us than they did in the supplier,” Incudine says. “That’s a unique scenario. There has to be a level of trust there, and that trust came from the partnership we’d already built.” ADP, which wasn’t operating in North Carolina at the time, also had to step outside its own regional network to support the project. Incudine says the strength of the Volvo relationship made the decision possible. Regional LTL carriers like ADP can be a strong fit for this kind of work because they tend to know their customers closely, understand the freight and can respond quickly when a transportation issue becomes a broader supply chain challenge. “We wouldn’t have been in North Carolina three years ago if we hadn’t gotten an ask from such a strong partner,” Incudine says. “I think it speaks to the level of partnership and trust we’d built through execution and transparency.” That transparency had to flow both ways, of course. He says Volvo was direct about what it needed, while ADP was equally direct about what was working, what needed attention and where the operation needed support. That open communication helped both companies work through a project that was anything but simple. “It wasn’t all easy. There was blood and sweat, and some tears,” he says, laughing, “but we got Volvo what they needed.”