Penny Wise and Pound Foolish

 In 'The Historie of Foure-footed Beastes' (1607) Edward Topsell wrote: 'If by covetousnesse or negligence, one withdraw from them their ordinary foode, he shall be penny wise, and pound foolish.'" From "The Dictionary of Cliches" by James Rogers (Ballantine Books, New York, 1985).

What the heck does that have to do with Bar Coding? I have seen people spending thousands of dollars on software to automate their warehouse or manufacturing operations and then waste money by buying hardware that is designed for consumer use or is not rated to handle the load or environment.

For example, buying a low volume bar code printer that prints so slowly that employees have to stand there and wait for labels to be printed. How much does it cost your company for this "wait time"? Buy a printer that avoids this and save yourself the money of wasted employee productivity.

Another example is buying handheld computers that cannot withstand use in the warehouse or manufacturing environment. Replacing broken hardware not only is costly but results in down time and again lost productivity. So a few bucks saved on a device will quickly be lost.

Here is a video I saw that demonstrates how durable industrial grade devices can be.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_PY23716aM Take a look and I think you will amazed!

Physical Count Success Story

I recently heard about a company that was spending a fortune doing their physical counts. They were deploying 30 employees one full week to do inventory. During this down time, the company was practically shut down. They could not receive any inventory, ship any product or conduct any other business that would affect inventory.

After a warehouse analysis, they installed a Radio Frequency based mobile scanning system and were up and running in less than 10 days. Their first inventory with the scanning system was done in SIX hours! Take a look at the video here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBncW6qz2Fg

How to Reduce Physical Count Time by 75%

Everybody hates to do physical counts. They typically are done after hours or on weekends. The staff helping out is not familiar with the inventory items and just wants to get it over with. Why do it at all? Usually most people will answer" because our accounting firm requires it".
Physical Count is very important to an efficient running distribution operation. Every time there is one inventory error there are really two errors. They grow like rabbits! What if this was a way to get this done and drastically reduce the time needed? Here is a video that will show you how. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9AFhl2M2d0

If you implement a system like this you could now begin to implement cycle counts where you break the physical into smaller parts thus achieving even greater inventory accuracy.

Getting Control of Your Shipping

One of the problems that I constantly hear about is people shipping the wrong product to the wrong customer. As I have mentioned before, this creates a lot of unnecessary costs. You have to get the product shipped back to you at your expense. You have to expedite shipping the correct item to the customer. You have to process all of the back office transactions, etc.

An intangible cost is the disappointment and perhaps serious inconvenience of your customer. If you lose that customer over the incident, you have lost future sales from that customer. I saw this video of how one company is using Radio Frequency technology and mobile data collection to eliminate this cost. The video can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jymNYIk5xKY