Success story \\\ Manufacturing \\\
overhead by a quarter through improved visibility of products. “The system tells us what we have in stock, where it is and when we need to reorder,” explained Killworth. “It has given us the confidence to lower our stock overhead and this saves us a lot of money – without any detrimental effect on our ability to supply our customers. We don’t even need to keep buffer stocks for our faster moving lines as we can order based on our MRP.”
Perpetual stock take saves time and money
With a large range of products running into the hundreds of thousands of individual items, keeping track of stock is a necessity. Select Hardware’s original approach was similar to many other organisations still lacking automation. Each year the company would undertake an annual stock take, bringing the entire business to a standstill while it completed its arduous manual process. This has been eliminated with the introduction of Syspro and hand held barcode scanners. “Perpetual stock take is a big thing for us,” commented Killworth. “Our old yearly procedure would require us to shut down virtually for a week. We would then discover
discrepancies, which would take time to resolve. At the same time, you had the sales team wanting to start up supplies again. It was problematic and we would have to write off a lot of stock because we had to get back to business! Now we run a weekly stock take and every discrepancy is picked up and rectified and we no longer lose out on stock write offs.”
stream directly into the system. Only 10 per cent of orders come via fax, so we’re saving a lot of order entry time.”
Future plans Full visibility
“When we brought in Syspro we wanted it to automate and replicate our standard procedures. The system allows this with the added advantage of full visibility of information. It has also allowed us to automate the vast majority of our orders via wireless mobile computers equipped with scanners or EDI. Sixty to 70 per cent of orders come by the handhelds used by our sales force or by customers. All they do is scan the items on the shelf and enter the number they require. The orders are transferred electronically direct to our sales office and into Syspro. This calls off the stock as required. “EDI is used for some of our larger customers such as Homebase, Morrisons and Screwfix,” said Killworth. “These EDI orders
With barcode scanners already in use for goods in and replenishing pick slots; the plan is to introduce bar code picking to close the automatic identification loop. In addition, companies who import manufactured goods from overseas have to monitor their landed costs. Syspro will allow Select Hardware to streamline the implementation of automated procedures for both of these functions. Killworth concluded: “By automating picking we’ll gain further accuracies but first we have to standardise our barcode format within the Group. This is something we are intending to do over the next 12 months. We are also keen to automate our landed cost tracking. We currently do this outside of the system, but Syspro provides the means to handle this automatically once it is set up. We are also investigating the opportunity to implement batch traceability with Syspro. All of these opportunities and more are well within the scope of our system – that is the beauty of Syspro; there is always something more you can do with it.”
www.logisticsit.com
October 2011
MANUFACTURING &LOGISTICS
IT 23
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