Stepping it up

The company’s outbound shipments are strictly scheduled to meet the increasingly high expectations of its customers. 

“A few years ago, we used to have six or eight weeks to deliver a system,” Richardson explains.  “Now we’re down to a week and a half. That’s what we have to do to stay competitive.”

From the time an order is received at the Georgetown facility, the company generally has no more than two days to get it out the door.

This is much more complicated than simply opening one box and putting its contents into another. Workers must assemble each system out of a multitude of components—most of them very small—stored in the stock area. A single system can require up to 40 or 50 different order picks.

Then there are non-systems shipments. The company must also stock components for spare parts orders, breakdowns and re-stocking at other branches, as well as refurbished items. Often, Mold-Masters has to fulfill these impossible-to-forecast requests the same day it receives the orders.

“We have to incorporate spare parts shipments into the picking system as well, and co-ordinate it all with our timing with the couriers,” Richardson says. “It’s a real juggling act.”

An unsustainable process
The company has not historically had much of a strategy for managing this complicated inventory balance. Before 2007, most parts were simply stacked in the stockroom, a section of 12-foot-high shelving sprawled across more than 2,000sqf of valuable manufacturing floor space.

Inventory was loosely tracked through a paper-based system linked to the company’s SAP ERP. The ERP was not set up to manage locations for individual SKUs—instead, each of the eight to 10 individuals working in the stockroom had to rely on experience to know where parts were.

To fill an order, staff would have to walk back and forth, box in tow, until all the parts were gathered. It was a time-consuming and frustrating process, and it only got worse when demand spiked. During these periods Richardson would have to lure people from other departments—most of whom were unfamiliar with the intricacies of the stockroom—with overtime pay.

“At times I had 16 people working through the stockroom. Sometimes I had people working midnights just to get the orders out,” he says.

Even when the stockroom was staffed with veterans, mistakes were common. Since many Mold-Masters components look alike, the wrong parts were regularly sent down the line, meaning those working in assembly would find themselves with a titanium part, say, where stainless steel was needed.