Three years ago, Charles Mintz noticed that the company where he worked, Superior Tool Co., was falling behind its customers in use of technology.
He tried to convince himself that it wasn’t really a problem, since the company manufactures plumbing hand tools-products that are anything but high-tech.
But he knew better. His customers, primarily big-box hardware retailers such as Home Depot, Lowe’s and Builder’s Square, wanted to exchange business documents electronically. They wanted to send orders and receive confirmation in real time by modem. If Superior Tool didn’t figure out how to do so, some other company certainly would.
As vice president of operations, Mintz undertook the job. He knew all along it would alter the interactions between Superior Tool and its customers.
He never guessed how it would fundamentally alter company operations.
The simplest short-term solution-and it was tempting because it would have satisfied the customers with minimal internal change-would have been to download purchase orders, print them out and re-enter them into the computer in the company’s database.
That raised a staffing issue, Mintz says. With only one employee dedicated to processing orders, the company (with more than $10 million in sales last year) could handle about 50 orders a day.
But Superior’s customers don’t place orders according to a regular schedule; the company often receives 120 orders one day and 20 the next. If those orders are being accepted electronically, the customers would necessarily expect fast, if not immediate, confirmation.
“We’d have been holding up our ability to respond to the peaks and valleys of the business,” Mintz says. “We would have needed more clerical people than we have now and probably would have provided poorer service. Every time you have to take something and re-enter it, there’s more chance for error.”
That reality led to some bigger thinking. “We ended up organizing internally around the need instead of looking at it as an add-on,” Mintz says. “We decided to run the company more technologically.”
The company upgraded its computers from primarily accounting and office functions to a software-based system that touches every aspect of daily operations, from inventory management to the all-important electronic data interchange (EDI) that customers were demanding.
The move required Superior’s employees to upgrade their computer skills, a side effect that Mintz says also improved overall productivity.
Today, customer orders flow in through the computer network and are downloaded into the local network each morning. There, they are filed into a customer database.
Each database file is opened and the orders are checked against warehoused inventory. If the products are immediately available, a packing list is printed out and sent to the warehouse for fulfillment.
In the warehouse, a bar code is automatically printed, and then scanned to create shipping documentation. At the end of the day, the data is sent back to the database, which creates and sends an electronic invoice back to the customers.
Mintz says the system has improved the way Superior does business. It cost more than $50,000 and took 3 months to be fully operational, but the results have been all positive.
“It’s extended our service capability,” he says. “Now, when a call comes in we can not only tell them if we shipped it, but who got it, what it weighed and when. We can give them a little more service than before.”
And that has made Superior Tool feel truly superior.
