Home Team Highlight: Operations

At Epicure, every Home Team Member plays a vital role in our success. And nowhere is that more true than in the Operations Department.

Operations consists of several groups: purchasing, planning/analysis, quality assurance, production, mechanical support, distribution, and warehousing—everything required to produce, store, and ship products; plan for and analyze product demand; and ensure that Epicure's products and processes are meeting our (and our Consultants') expectations.

These groups include about 65–100 Home Team Members, depending on the time of year. As you might expect, the months leading up to Thanksgiving and Christmas are Operations' busiest time, so extra Team Members are brought on to keep things running smoothly.

On an average day, the Operations department picks, packs and ships 12,000 lines on 600 orders. (A line may be one product or several, and the average order has a whopping 20 items on it!) During peak periods in November and early December, Epicure sees extreme order activity, ranging from 45,000 lines to over 93,000 lines, which we saw on a record-setting day this January.

Despite the seemingly overwhelming order volume, our Home Team Members still get the job done, and are constantly striving to meet the “In and Out in 72 Hours” promise. That's Epicure's assurance to Consultants that their order will be shipped less than 72 hours after it's placed. And our Operations Home Team Members are amazing enough to do it!

In an effort to constantly improve, Epicure is always looking at ways to be more efficient and accurate, especially in fulfilling product orders. Operations has analyzed our product slotting and implemented a number of efficiencies to maximize our pick rate. We also installed a new air-pack system to make packing faster and easier for our Home Team Members.

As Epicure has grown, we've realized that we can't simply keep adding Home Team members. So we'll be implementing new technology in the Distribution Centre this fall. We're super excited about this: We expect it will help us be 30 per cent faster and even more accurate with Consultant orders!

Some of our Operations Team Members posing for a photo.