Stepping it up

Staff would often discover that a necessary part was out of stock. If the part—like 70 percent of Mold-Masters stock—was manufactured in-house, this would necessitate a rush order, which interrupted regular workflow and added hours to the process.

“It was just chaos,” Richardson says. “The accuracy was just not good. We had people working there who did not know what they were doing. It was acceptable then, because we had to get the orders out. But it just didn’t work.

“It was fairly simple. We had to move forward.”

Finding a new way
Armed with examples of these bad practices, Richardson had a fairly easy job convincing upper management that change was necessary.

And determining what that change should be proved surprisingly painless. Early on in his vendor and equipment evaluations, Richardson crossed paths with Mississauga, Ontario-based Johnston Equipment, whose staff suggested that automated vertical lift modules (VLMs) might be a good fit. After a few visits to sites where the VLMs were in use, Richardson was intrigued enough to invite Johnston in to see what could be done.

“We came in and learned their process, did a cube analysis and then came back with some proposals,” recalls Brian Rodway, sales manager with Johnston Equipment’s storage solutions group.

An early plan was to store parts in 30-ft high VLMs, which would have required an addition to the building. But since Richardson was not entirely comfortable making such a drastic change to accommodate a technology he had yet to use, Johnston devised a more easily digestible option.

“The shuttles are modular,” Rodway explains. “So to mitigate the risk, they said ‘let’s get the machines in, and let’s make them short machines. If we choose later to add a room and go 30-ft high, we’ll move them and make them taller.’”

This option satisfied Richardson, and the Johnston team created an implementation plan. Working off-shifts over the course of a week in June 2007, they installed two Remstar Shuttle XP units, each just over 14ft tall.

The switchover
As expected, introducing automated equipment into a totally manual process presented some challenges.

After the Shuttles were installed, Mold-Masters assigned four work
ers—two per machine—to work with Johnston to populate them. VLMs work best when they contain a mix of different SKUs; this helps to distribute the picking burden between machines. But since the installation team had little hard information about the activity and quantity of any given item in stock, they had no structured methodology to determine what would go where. Ultimately, they chose to start by loading the parts they knew from experience to be popular.