Industrial distributor opens the productivity valve

With 18 locations across Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Mexico, industrial distributor Rawson offers instruments, valves and accessories in addition to a growing value-add business assembling components. After a sequence of major software projects, the company has improved throughput, accuracy and visibility.

Rawson’s warehouse operations were paper based until 2009 and relied on a 30-year-old JD Edwards enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, leading to problems with inventory accuracy and delayed shipments.

Jeff Greenberg, director of operations at Rawson, was tasked with evaluating a new warehouse management system (WMS; PathGuide Technologies, ) and visited several warehouses where it was currently in use. “The warehouses we visited were so quiet and organized that we thought they weren’t busy,” he says. He was also skeptical about the WMS’s ability to interface with Rawson’s old ERP.

Greenberg says the company’s new WMS has significantly improved warehouse processes. For the next three years, Rawson had an error rate close to zero for shipping incorrect products. Then, in 2012, the company replaced its entire ERP system. The existing WMS solution was phased out and replaced with the WMS functionality built into the new ERP. “We realized that our ERP didn’t have the same richness in put away and picking routines, like being able to prevent users from mixing orders,” he says. “We lost functionality, but we thought we could live without it.”

Within a year, as the company’s value-add business continued to expand, Greenberg and his team installed two vertical lifts, became frustrated with how the new equipment integrated with their existing software, and re-deployed their original WMS.

“There’s been a drastic reduction in shipping mistakes,” Greenberg says. “The shipping manifest system allows us to scan bar codes and interface directly with the ERP while also auto-populating information for the shipping station. We have 14 people using the system on a daily basis, and they are able to scan and match inventory to an original purchase order and create bar codes on the spot. The dashboard is great for managing daily routines, so it’s easy to locate orders and see whether they’re on hold, ready for shipment, or ready to be picked.”