Progressive Distributor

A step up

By eliminating steps in the picking and packing process, All Fasteners gains inventory management efficiencies

by Rich Vurva

Fastener distributor All Fasteners Inc. (AF) in Franksville, Wis., has used a wireless warehouse system for a decade. A recent upgrade made an already efficient operation better.

AF provides industrial fastening products and other Class C commodities to original equipment manufacturers in southeast Wisconsin. Its primary business is vendor-managed inventory (VMI) programs for companies that manufacture generators, electrical components, heat transfer equipment, lighting, agricultural equipment and more.

“In a VMI program, the product is going right from our inventory to their assembly line. There’s no receiving or inspection. It has to be accurate,” says president Jim Ruetz.

In a typical VMI account, floor stockers make scheduled visits to the customer’s facility to manage their fastener inventory. They sometimes arrange multiple stops within one plant, scanning fastener bins.

Before leaving Franksville each morning, the floor stocker downloads the customer’s contract into a Symbol MC70 handheld mobile computer from Motorola. The process takes about 15 minutes.

“Their Symbol unit stores everything that the customer has on the contract. When they go to a particular area, they select that contract group and begin the scanning process,” says Ruetz. The unit displays the quantity of fasteners that should be replenished in each bin.

He then connects to AF’s server through a virtual private network (VPN) using the Symbol unit. Because the handheld computer provides both real-time data and voice communications, it eliminated the need for stockers to carry cell phones.

No lost time
In the past, floor stockers retrieved data using handheld scanners, and then uploaded the data when they returned to the office.

“If they had a lot of scans to do at a customer location, they might not be back here until 5 p.m. By the time it got uploaded into the system that night or the next morning, we lost time for order filling,” says Ruetz. “Because we strive to minimize our customers’ inventory levels and replenish products on a regular schedule, every minute and hour is important to us.”

Occasionally, a line leader will tell the floor stocker about a change in production that will cause a temporary inventory spike. When that happens, he overrides the quantity displayed on the Symbol unit. The new quantity gets uploaded within seconds.

The Activant Prophet 21 enterprise software system generates pick tickets in the warehouse every 30 minutes. Previously, orders were downloaded at the end of the business day and handled in batches. If the floor stocker put in overtime on a given day, he’d sometimes wait until the next morning to upload the data, delaying the process further. The new system downloads orders throughout the day, which means warehouse team members could conceivably begin filling orders even before the floor stocker returns to Franksville.

“With most customers, we try to ship once or twice a week. But if any customer needs something right away, we can begin picking an order within a few minutes after it’s scanned,” says IT manager Bill Pittman.

His goal is to phase out paper pick tickets within the next several months.

“We’re using the paper pick tickets as a backup right now. When we went live, we had so much change going on internally, that we felt it was nice to have them as a visual reminder and for verification purposes,” he says.

Warehouse productivity gains
AF previously used Faspac Systems software to manage inventory. Since Faspac was acquired by Prophet 21 in 2003, Ruetz says improvements to the system have generated additional efficiencies.

For example, AF previously used a random logical warehouse inventory process. Products were stored in the warehouse randomly, which meant pickers relied on Faspac to tell them where to store and retrieve items. To save time in the picking process, the warehouse crew tended to organize products by customer. When filling an order for Customer A, pickers could stay within one or two aisles in the warehouse most of the time.

To avoid zigzagging through the warehouse, pickers sometimes cheated the system by picking products out of sequence.

“That caused them to go out of order, which meant mistakes could happen. They could miss something or mislabel something,” says Ruetz.

The Prophet 21 Wireless Warehouse Management Solution directs the picker via a wireless handheld device to the appropriate warehouse location in a logical sequence, eliminating backtracking.

“Pickers don’t walk across the same territory twice. That significantly increased efficiency. They don’t have to worry about trying to cheat the system,” says Ruetz.

If the picker scans the wrong product, the scanner beeps and the system won’t allow him to proceed.

Pickers use pushcarts to move products, and print bar code labels using a wireless label printer on the cart. Using the old system, if a picker needed multiple labels to complete an order, he’d have to walk to a designated printer to generate labels. Pickers place completed orders on a shipping container that also contains a bar code label. When the container arrives at the customer’s location and someone scans the label, it tells them exactly where to deliver the material.

The new system has boosted fill rates to between 99.95 percent and 99.98 percent accuracy.