 DPS/Real-World Solutions: Industrial Food Ingredients
Skidmore Sales & Distributing Finds the Right Mix
Demonstrating Applied Advantages Of DPS Zap™ WMS
Customer Description
Skidmore Sales has been a distributor and broker of ingredients for food processors and manufacturers for 41 years. They understand the demands on their customers. Their answer is exceptionally reliable service, a full line of quality ingredients, and unmatched technical expertise. Their staff of experienced food technologists is available to assist customers in selecting ingredients – whether they are trying to solve a process problem or developing something completely new.
Beginning in September of 1963 as a manufacturers representative, the Skidmore organization has grown to 45 employees with over 1400 customers. Skidmore Sales now warehouses in five locations outside the Cincinnati area and has sales coverage in eighteen states. Their main Cincinnati location utilizes a 152,000 sq ft. pre-cast concrete facility, with two large coolers and a repackaging room.
Project Challenge
At Skidmore Sales, the goal has always been very simple: to be of service to customers and suppliers. With a goal of providing perfect service, monitoring and measuring performance is a part of the Skidmore culture. Order and shipping accuracy are consistently over 99% and on-time shipments are 98.8%. But with his logistics background, Supply Chain VP Jack Buecker recognized the opportunity to bring additional control and improvement to the warehouse with an automated Warehouse Management System (WMS). (To access IBM podcast interview with Jack, click here.)
One challenge was to find a more efficient method of lot tracking. The food ingredients supply chain must track inventory at the lot number level. While Skidmore’s ERP supported lot number tracking from the point of receipt, it required so much manual writing of the lot number that the tracking process began with shipping, not receiving.
An additional area needing attention was managing compliancy labeling and documents (certificates of analysis, letters of guarantee, Kosher and Halal certifications, specifications, and more). Doug Skidmore, CEO, “We’re in the document business now. It has fallen to the distributor to provide to the customers not only the lot level data but also all of the compliancy labeling and documentation.” Skidmore not only needed accuracy, but also a system that facilitated timeliness and flexibility to integrate this additional data into the workflow.
Strategy
After carefully defining goals and requirements, the Skidmore project team conducted a number of vendor evaluations. Included in that evaluation process was DPS, Inc., Skidmore’s partner for ERP. After working with Wholesale Distributors for almost 30 years, DPS had developed DPS Zap – a WMS system – with standard interfaces to the DPS Extend ERP solution. An added plus was that it runs on the IBM iSeries platform that Skidmore already had in place.
Per Jack – “We carefully considered other solutions that specialize in WMS but in the end were comfortable that DPS would meet our requirements. This approach all but eliminated data integrity and interfacing issues. Besides, by buying both the scanner hardware and warehousing software from DPS I only have to make one phone call for support!”
Dennis Meyers, IT Manager and co-project manager, shared these observations: “We did a couple of things to help with the transition. We spent an extra month in training, one hour a day with each warehouse person, and that was well worth the effort. For the first full physical inventory, we paired one office person teamed with one forklift person on a vehicle with a scanning gun. That effort made this a great team success.”
Results
With a focus on testing, training, and teamwork Skidmore implemented the WMS application in January of 2006. Feedback from the project team:
Jack Buecker, Supply Chain VP: “I’ll tell you, our paper has been so cleaned up through this process. Instead of having all messages print on one document, we now have a specific message on the pick, on the pack, on the invoice – all based on the customer, warehouse, or carrier. The document is tailored to the recipient. Our customers are ecstatic about the improvement in paper.”
Mary Horine, Customer Service Manager: “I think we’ve discovered another thing as a result of this process. It made us work as a team. Even outside sales was involved in the process. I think we benefited from this in ways that we hadn’t anticipated – we’re real happy with it all. We know that DPS was right for us. Our project team leaders held weekly meetings throughout the implementation. DPS was very responsive. It was definitely a good partnership. It was a BIG team effort.”
Skidmore Sales exceeds customer needs and expectations with responsive, dependable service. With DPS, they’ve found a partner who has the same values and can help them achieve their goals. It’s a recipe for success.
DPS ZapTM runs on the IBM iSeries and System i5 and can be integrated with any ERP solution.
IBM iSeries and System i5 are registered trademarks of the IBM Corporation.
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