As our state begins the process of easing stay-at-home orders and opening up businesses, ACS has continued to invest in its workforce of dedicated, essential employees.
The most important investment we made was to maintain our workforce. While the number of inbound truckloads has diminished due to a reduction in orders for hotels, restaurants, and food distributors, the orders for grocery stores as well as zoo and aquarium seafood orders remained strong.
Another investment we made with our workforce was in extended training. ACS has taken this “slowdown” period to reinforce our fundamental process and procedural training. We cross-trained team members in other processes to diversify their knowledge base. We also introduced a Radio Frequency (RF) “gun” system training for all warehouse employees.
The RF System captures all pertinent label information from each case for more efficient item tracking purposes. The system eliminates several of the steps for “paper trails” in product tracing by providing real-time updates into our Warehouse Management System of inbound and outbound orders. This will help eliminate the lag time that occurs when publishing the status of any item, order, or receipt.
Cross training and refresher training focused on the several types of material handling equipment that ACS utilizes on a daily basis. These range from the electric pallet jack to the double-reach forklifts and sit-down forklifts. In addition, there were training opportunities on turret trucks that carry the operator 36-feet into the air for pallet or case retrieval from seven-high pallet racks.
Safety & Sanitation training also continues to be a focus for daily operations during this time, as it does every day.
Importantly, the National School Lunch Program commodities continue to be delivered to counties who are distributing food items to the families of K-12 students, throughout the stay-at-home orders. Additionally, we are shipping orders to Salvation Army Missions located in Tampa, St. Petersburg, Orlando, Jacksonville and Miami.
Because of these investments in our employees and customer community, we intend to be more focused and absolutely prepared to meet anticipated customer demands and changing regulatory requirements as the economy gets rolling again.