NLMK USA

In order to control inventory, the NLMK team previously conducted an annual physical inventory in a storeroom containing over 10,000 items and parts each Fall. Employees recorded counts with pen and paper, followed by manually entering that data into the ERP system. “It was very time consuming to do once a year,” explains Hemmerlin. “Since using RFgen, we’ve cut our cycle counting time by 60%. What used to take half a day now takes only two or three hours.” RFgen’s real-time inventory data also enabled the team to start generating analytics on those counts. The operation’s ability to track what products are on the shelf, missing or moving at an acceptable rate, has been helpful in driving future improvements. After RFgen, their accuracy rate is 96-100%. “From an IT perspective, what I like best about RFgen is that it communicates with our SQL server and Oracle environment simultaneously,” says Hemmerlin, who believes this to be one of the top features of their RFgen solution.

RFgen helped enhance delivery at the Sharon Coating facility by enabling the team to accurately track finished coil inventory in real time. This success led them to implement a similar system at other locations.

Rowe describes the former process: “Crane operators would move coils at night. So to track coil movements, a guy went out twice a day to write down coil locations–once in the morning and once at night. That way, on the following day, the team knows what coils to get and from where.”

“Our guys would spend a lot of time searching for coils to get them staged for loading the next day,” adds Hemmerlin. “Our on-time delivery was slipping.”

RFgen made a big difference by freeing employees from spending all day physically looking for coils, allowing them to be redirected onto other, more crucial functions.

“As a tracking system, it’s made a huge difference to be able to physically find our coils on the floor and stage them for shipping,” says Hemmerlin. “That’s been a big change for our process. RFgen has definitely improved our delivery to customers to ensure we get their steel out the door when the customer wants it. [RFgen] has made a big difference.”

One of the most significant benefits NLMK USA experienced was through the RFgen Mobile Development Studio, an easy-to-use mobile app development platform (MADP) that empowers in-house developers to maintain, modify, create and deploy mobile apps without outside assistance.

“The number one feature for us was the ability to rapidly build and develop applications with very little technical training,” explains Hemmerlin. “That’s critical for us.”

In addition, the RFgen Mobile Development Studio’s standardized approach enables updates, bug fixes and new apps to be pushed out to all devices at once without having to physically obtain the device and update each individually.

“In the old system, we had no ability to make changes to the system,” recalls Hemmerlin. “Now we are free to build and deploy fixes and extra functionality.” Rowe adds: “What’s been really good for us with RFgen, is being able to deploy a mobile platform and handheld devices without building ten different custom little apps, and then trying to deploy and manage them, especially when you don’t have the resources to build those custom one-off applications for your floor employees.”

“From a development standpoint, mobile is not really our wheelhouse,” says Hemmerlin. “If we had to build these applications from scratch, it would have easily doubled or tripled the timeline and possibly the budget,” adds Rowe.

With their legacy system, data fields were freeform without standardized controls to preserve data consistency.

“Every operator had his own location method,” recalls Hemmerlin. “Some guys would name it location 1-2-3 and another would name it location A-C-D-E, giving us two sets of data for the same location.”

This meant they had no way to verify if inventory IDs were true–or if that inventory even existed at all. It’s no wonder NLMK employees were spending so much time looking for coils on the floor.

Rowe adds: “[Hemmerlin] was able to leverage the RFgen platform to do more validation and control the process. We couldn’t really do that before.”

The RFgen platform enabled the IT team to build in controls around how operators scanned coils and location to prevent duplicated or inaccurate data. To ensure that items were scanned into the correct locations, Hemmerlin introduced a new process that consisted of hanging barcodes from the ceiling which could then be scanned using long-range scanners and validated in Oracle. This way, all coil locations and data sets could be standardized and made uniform throughout their operation.

In the end, Rowe and Hemmerlin felt using RFgen to transform their location tracking and cycle counting processes was a worthwhile investment with a scalable, self-sustaining Mobile App Development Platform solution.

“We’ve been running solid ever since,” adds Hemmerlin. “Overall, I think it was pretty successful.”

“It’s a good solution for a lot of problems we’ve faced here,” he goes on to add. “RFgen has been very responsive from a customer service standpoint. When we have questions, we reach out and get a good response time back from support. Our sales rep has been great.”