Executive Summary
Team Icicle was formed on Tuesday, September 16,1997. Our duty was to locate a business and investigate an ongoing problem in its management process. After careful consideration our team selected Hibbett Sports Inc. Through investigation of Hibbetts we found that one of their main problems was that they have a large inventory of sports shoes. This large inventory makes the simple task of locating a shoe for customers fairly time consuming. Further complicating the process is the fact that many of the shoes are in the same boxes. Nikes are in the same box as all other Nike's and it is very difficult to distinguish between the pairs of shoes. Several lost sales result from the employees not being able to locate a pair of shoes for the customers. Our suggestion to management was to color code the boxes according to styles. This simple but effective system reduces the time it takes for employees to locate a pair of shoes. We selected four styles of shoes that the employees recommended as "top sellers." We color coded each shoe with a different color by placing a sticker on the bottom of the shoe on display and the same sticker on the box in the stock room. The group did before-and-after time trials, which showed the effectiveness of the system. According to the recorded times our system reduced the time by as much as 30 percent in certain employees. The employees were impressed with the ease of the new system and stated that it would help to reduce lost sales.