Deliverables

Georgia DFCS Network Expansion:  In prior years, ESF partnered with Division of Family & Children Services (DFCS) to receive private information concerning families and children in the metro-Atlanta area that received government support and benefits. Due to HIPAA’s guidelines and protection, ESF’s clientele was limited to only 22,000 children in 2021 versus over 40 thousand children served in years prior. As a result of Team 14’s efforts to establish a new line of communication, DFCS will now be the direct distributor of the information about ESF’s holiday program. 

Online Ordering Interface Redesign & Curated Pick Up Locations: In 2021, 14% of eligible families that were registered and had confirmed benefits failed to complete the online ordering process, leaving approximately 3,500 children unserved. Due to inconsistencies in the ordering interface and fundamental issues with guardian usability, these families were essentially unable to checkout. Team 14 proposed and redesigned the entire online ordering interface by adding a progress bar, eliminating the guardians need to navigate between categories, and clearly indicating when childrens’ orders are complete or incomplete. Additionally, instructions were included within each section, rather than at the top of the page, making it easier for guardians to understand what is required of them. Pop-ups and automatic reminder emails will also be utilized in effort to retain parents until the end of the ordering process. An FAQ page will be added for guardians to troubleshoot common issues without needing to contact ESF directly. 

When analyzing the data, the team noticed that 17% of orders changed pickup location. The team was able to identify two main causes for this. First, parents were choosing their pick up location upon registration, often weeks or more in advance of the actual date. Second, many parents were just choosing one of the first few options without realizing they could scroll down for more options that may be closer to them. In our interface redesign, we incorporated a step specifically for parents to select their pick up location, and moved it to the very end of the ordering process. In addition to this, we have also worked with the Salesforce team to integrate GoogleMaps so parents will be shown curated pickup locations according to proximity to parents address.

Lock Pick Up Locations Upon Printing of Last Pick Wave: Currently, ESF allows guardians to place or reschedule orders for a pickup event 48 hours before the date itself. As such, 20.7% of guardians placed or rescheduled orders after processing began, meaning ESF could have never processed them before these newly scheduled times. Thus, the team determined that ESF should “lock” pickup dates when the last wave of pick sheets for a given pickup date is printed such that no orders can be placed for or rescheduled to that pickup date. Whilst still allowing for some flexibility (as there were 68 locations and pickup dates available for registration in 2021), this would prevent ESF from scrambling to find unprocessed orders. 

Scheduling Processing, Distribution, and Pickup: 

Frequency Based Allocation & Rerouting: After testing many different storage allocation alternatives, the team concluded that frequency-based allocation on the pick floor was the best alternative that ESF could reasonably implement. Frequency-based allocation will reduce average picking route length by 27 meters, or about 28 seconds saved per order. This will save 91 hours when serving 30,000 children. Additionally, reverse routing and S-shaped routing will reduce volunteer backtracking and congestion. Since most frequently ordered items will be located in aisle A, they will be at the end of a volunteers pick route, and volunteers will begin at varied points in the aisles rather than all starting at A1.

Integrating Quality Control into Picking: In order to distribute all of the orders by their Christmas deadline, ESF completely relies on volunteers to pick, verify, and pack orders between November 1st and December 22nd. In 2021, ESF averaged 1.5 orders processed per volunteer hour. However, ESF plans to handle 11,600 orders in 2022, which means that they would either need to utilize volunteer hours more efficiently, or solicit more volunteer hours in order to meet their Christmas deadline. The team observed opportunities to improve the former. In the original system, after picking orders, volunteers would transfer goods to a Quality Control step in the process that would induce double handling, misuse time, and ineffectively catch errors in processing. In 2022, ESF will redesign the order processing procedure such that picking and quality control are combined. Volunteers will now be given a scanner for picking such that as they traverse through pick locations with their picksheet and cart, they will scan as they pick each item to confirm accuracy.