THE COMPANY:
Gill Services, Inc. is recognized as an industry leader in the supply of equipment, parts and repair services for the drilling and well servicing industries with a worldwide distribution network. After 32 years in the business, they have established themselves as one of the best at delivering quality products and great customer service.
THE PROBLEM:
Gill Services contacted Scanco with a mission in mind. They wanted to automate their physical count process and they wanted it done in 10 days. Their Scanco consultant scheduled a warehouse analysis to dive into their current process and find out when and where the bottlenecks where happening. It became apparent that physical counts were costing them production time and an unnecessary amount of employee resources. “It would take our entire employee base five days to count inventory,” said Gay Wathen, President. Their timetable broke down like this:
Day 1: Shut down production and pull all thirty employees to write down inventory quantities and serial numbers on tags throughout five warehouses.
Day 2: Compile tag results and record them on the Sage MAS 90 ERP count sheets.
Day 3: Enter count sheet information into MAS 90. Day 4: Run variance register and review all discrepancies. Day 5: Post final results of physical count.
Gay Wathen and the rest of the Gill Services team was ready to automate.
THE SOLUTION:
Scanco recommended the RF Solution to give Gill Services the advantage of real-time validation. It was imperative that every serial number was recorded accurately during the count and RF provided the double-check they needed. RF would also eliminate the tedious data entry by sending all the scans immediately to MAS 90.
Their inventory also needed to be barcoded. Scanco proposed MASPrint Designer and a Zebra thermal printer as a solution. MASPrint Designer would give them the ability to print barcode labels quickly and also offer design flexibility.
Gill Services placed the order a few days after the warehouse analysis and received the handhelds the Friday before the physical count. The printer they ordered was on back-order, so Scanco sent an in-house printer for them to use until their printer arrived. The Technical Support team worked with Wathen to design a customized label with a barcoded item number and serial number. Gill Services was able to start printing and labeling products by the end of the day.
Remote training began on Monday and the employees were able to ask questions and try the different features of the handheld. “I thought that there would be all kinds of ‘oops’ and human errors because of the learning curve, but I was shocked at how easy and fast it was,” said Wathen. The wireless network was installed and tested and by Wednesday morning, it was time to count the inventory.
THE RESULTS:
Gill Services planned on spending two or three days on the automated inventory count. Here’s how the actual time table played out:
9:00 AM: Three employees were given Intermec CN3 handhelds loaded with the RF software.
11:00 AM: All inventory was counted and synced with Physical Count Transaction Entry.
2:30 PM: Variances were reviewed.
4:30 PM: Final count posted.