National Home Products

The company’s IT director began by using RFgen on its shop floor for Inventory Issue for raw materials, and Inventory Adjustment, Scrap and Completion for cut components. “Our inventory on raw materials and cut components was completely off,” he explained, “because we didn’t have a way to track materials used. Sometimes workers cut the wrong material. Other times there were scraps due to warping.”

Implementation was very successful, the IT director emphasized. “With RFgen, our inventory of raw materials and cut components became very accurate. We were even able to see the yield of each saw used to cut materials. We now know if each saw is producing 80%, 90% or 99% of its yield.”

Next, RFgen’s PO Receipts solution was implemented to give the company an up-to-date inventory on purchased parts. “Before RFgen, our inventory on purchased parts was in the dark,” said the IT director. “Several hours elapsed before our inventory on purchased parts was updated in our system. Now, as soon as purchased parts arrive at the dock, we scan them in and know immediately, in real-time, what our inventory on purchased parts is. No more delays.”

Over the subsequent years, the company has implemented many more RFgen solutions including:

• Pick, Pack and Ship displays items that are ready for pick, pack or ship confirmation. It also updates the status of sales order lines so the next step can occur.
• Upgrade of ST/OT system manages internal transfers between the company’s manufacturing facility in Mexico and its U.S. facilities.
• Tool Management Scanning scans tool changes. Now whenever a saw blade (or other tools) is changed, they know how long it has been used. Scanning provides the additional benefit of measuring supplier performance and quality.
• Rack ID uses scanning to pinpoint the location of inventory items. When workers put away components or raw material on a rack location, they use the RFgen “Inventory Transfer” function to scan both the location (rack) and the component.
• Cage Project scans consumable products. The cage on the shop floor has consumable products such as nails, paper towels, safety glasses and earplugs. Now the company uses RFgen scanning to keep track of the cage’s inventory and control costs.

Most recently, the company implemented RFgen for Cycle Counting. In the past, the IT director explained, workers would go to the floor, do a cycle count, write the counts on a piece of paper, then come back to the office to aggregate counts and manually data enter their figures into the JD Edwards system. Now each worker has a barcode scanner. They scan the barcode labels on the pallet and the information is captured in real-time in the JD Edwards system.

RFgen’s mobile data collection solution has replaced three to four hand-written steps. As a result, the accuracy and efficiency of our cycle counts have greatly improved. Overall, RFgen brings the stability we are seeking in the scanning area. This results in timely and accurate inventory, as well as efficiency on the floor. We are also now able to track vendor performance and the yields of our tools with performance reporting.