Success Stories

The nuts and bolts of All Fasteners' business is more than nuts and bolts, because the Franksville, WI, fastener distributor is actually two companies with different business models. One - affiliate All Tool Sales - is a traditional industrial distributor, supplying cutting tools, abrasives, machinery and components, and supplies to industrial customers, mainly in the upper Midwest. The other is in the vendor-managed inventory (VMI) business - it runs on-site parts warehouses for customers all over the Midwest supplying them with the fasteners and other supplies they need just when they need them.

"Our tool company is a typical user of the Activant Prophet 21® platform," said company President Jim Ruetz. "Prophet 21 has been a leader in industrial distribution for years. But they were weak on the fastener side, because they lacked elements like rework for plating and quality control."

The Power to Bring Everyone Together

That changed when Prophet 21 acquired Faspac, which All Fasteners used to run its VMI business since 1988, in 2003. Ruetz immediately recognized the acquisition as an opportunity to bring the companies' business units under one software umbrella, and as fastener functionality was added to Prophet 21, the reasons to switch became more compelling.

In August 2006, All Fasteners decided to make the switch, and while integrating the entire company on one platform is still a work in progress, they have already seen dramatic improvement on the fastener side.

The gains have been most dramatic in warehouse operations, thanks to Prophet 21's Wireless Warehouse Management Solution (WWMS) - technology that came along with Faspac but has improved significantly over what it offered, Ruetz noted. For starters, it's fully integrated: "On Faspac, we had homegrown software called AIMS that managed our VMI programs. As we updated information about customer contracts in its database, it automatically brought information up into Faspac to generate the orders. Meanwhile, our bin floor stockers were using barcode scanners to gather our warehouse data, but they entered the data into dumb terminals, and from there it went into our home-brewed system.

"This required us to maintain our contract database both on Faspac and our AIMS system. One of our goals was to eliminate this and run everything from one database on Prophet 21."

From Dumb Terminals to Smarter Order Processing

With Prophet 21's WWMS, customer contracts are downloaded into stockers' handheld computers, which also allows for on-the-fly adjustments in inventory levels according to customers' production demands. The solution allows All Fasteners bin floor stockers to transmit data directly into the system via VPN connection over the wireless phone in the scanner, which saves valuable time that had been spent uploading data once stockers returned to the office.

As a result, overtime required to process orders has plunged dramatically - in the first two quarters of 2008, All Fasteners logged 35 percent fewer overtime hours than in the same period in 2006. " We have significantly reduced the number of times we have people working on Saturdays to meet a Monday delivery date," Ruetz said.

A Solution That Exterminates Bugs

Accuracy has also risen dramatically with WWMS. Where All Fasteners' old system required pickers to obtain box labels for orders one at a time from a central printer, WWMS lets them print labels in batches on wireless printers attached directly to their mobile work carts, thus dramatically reducing the incidence of "bugs" - order errors caught internally before orders ship. "We were averaging five bugs a month on our old system," Ruetz said. "During our conversion, we implemented the wireless printers for our order fulfillment teams and had four bugs the entire quarter."

Because All Fasteners employees were already familiar with the basics of wireless warehouse management thanks to their Faspac experience, All Fasteners also experienced something unusual after the conversion to Prophet 21: Immediate productivity gains. "Whenever you implement a new system, there's a learning curve, and productivity usually goes down," said Ruetz. But because we were wireless before implementing Prophet 21, we saw our efficiency improve right after switching."

All Fasteners is now comfortable enough with the system to begin converting its tool division in the coming year. "It gives us much better ability to react to our customers' needs," said Ruetz. "It lets us be more proactive and flexible, and for our customers, flexibility is paramount to our service."

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