Chemical manufacturer’s on-time delivery rises to nearly 100%

With its year-end approaching, a U.S.-based specialty chemical company needed a full inventory of its manufacturing facility and warehouse, including weighing each of the thousands of containers in its production and warehouse areas. Yet, it lacked the bar code and inventory management software it needed to accomplish the task quickly and effectively.

The manufacturer implemented a new bar code system, along with durable, custom labels. It was able to bar code and inventory its products and parts in its warehouse, and it labeled and identified warehouse locations with an improved workflow and new bar code scanning technology.

The label vendor’s installation team completed the project by working in the manufacturer’s live operational environment without any disruptions to the process. Upon conclusion of the three-week inventory process, the chemical company had fully labeled and lined-out the warehouse—with bar code labels on all material, as well as workers capturing data with handheld mobile scanners.

“This gave us immediate improvement in the quality of data capture while we worked out what was needed to implement the full integration with our material requirements planning system,” says the chemical company’s director of supply chain operations.

The company also established a production environment in which employees became accustomed to using handheld scanners and transaction tracking. They were able to reduce errors by eliminating hand-written data recording and transcription, minimize time for finding and handling materials, and reduce the frequency of materials-related changes in the production schedule.

As a result, the chemical manufacturer transformed its inventory management challenge into a competitive advantage. On-time delivery increased dramatically. And, due to other improvements to processes and systems, along with a full integration to the material requirements planning system, the chemical company now operates at close to 100% on-time delivery—with a 22% reduction in inventory.