Taking the pain out of inventory management

Mace’s manufacturing process utilised hundreds of separate parts that the company had been purchasing from a wide range of suppliers on an ad hoc basis. This approach created a number of issues for the company. For example, the difficulty in keeping track of items meant there were regular issues where engineers found they didn’t have access to key parts and had to halt production to go and buy them. Also, the number of orders from such a wide range of different suppliers made the procurement process extremely time intensive and inefficient. “We were ordering hundreds of parts and it was easy to overlook when these items were running low in our store, or we could have over-ordered,” says Chris Peck, Purchasing Manager at Mace Industries. “We simply didn’t have clear visibility of what we had in stock and things were getting missed.” The combination of all these factors was driving up costs and reducing productivity, which led Peck to speak to RS about potential solutions.

Having noticed a pattern where Mace engineers were regularly ordering emergency parts each month, the RS Account Manager suggested moving to RS ScanStock®, This solution  involves RS providing a fully managed service where it takes responsibility for controlling and replenishing agreed products so that the customer can focus on other areas of their business. In the case of Mace Industries, RS first agreed how much of each stock item was needed on a weekly basis, then these parts were placed in clearly labelled bins, which engineers could easily find.

An RS representative visits the site every week and does a full stock check on all the bins before reordering any parts that are required to arrive the following week – if anything is urgently required it can be ordered for next-day delivery. They also use a blanket purchase order, which means they don’t need to raise individual purchase orders for these products, which means is a huge time saving, Instead, RS provides the data around how much we are spending and what we are spending it on, which allows them to budget effectively.

The company have saved significant time on its ordering process, reduced operational downtime and allowed its employees to focus their time on other areas of the business.

This has translated into £11,672 of savings over the year. The key elements that have enabled this saving are increased productivity (through reducing production downtime, and time spent locating parts and putting away orders), reduced inventory and a smaller number of purchase orders (POs). “There’s been a level of trust involved in this, but because we have a strong relationship with RS we believe that they are ideally placed to manage this process on behalf of our business,” says Chris Peck. “I can largely leave this side of the business alone, which means my time and the resulting cost from that is saved. From a productivity point of view, RS ScanStock® has helped massively – our engineers know exactly where all the products they need will be and that they will never be scrambling around for key parts, which could delay our operations.