POINT OF USE INVENTORY CONTROL

It is products and technology that provide a total solution for the management and streamlining of supply chains and inventory control at the point-of-use of consumables and tools.

Consumables:

All Business or Industrial processes use [or consume] a range of ‘items’ as inputs to their own process. These items constitute their input inventory. Industrial workers use Personal Protection Equipment [PPE] such as gloves, goggles and dust masks, together with items such as adhesive tapes, batteries, cutting tools and nuts & bolts as some of their consumable inputs. Office workers consume pens, paper and printer cartridges in performing their tasks. Without these inventory items, the business process stops. Traditionally, these items are ordered and stored by some form of Central Store in the Company. So that work flow is not interrupted, the “Supply Chain” for consumable items must keep items on hand to allow immediate satisfaction of employees needs. It must store the stock locally, monitor how much is on hand, order and take delivery of replenishment stock as required, pay for the replenishment stock, dispense the items to the people needing them, and finally account for all of this expenditure in some meaningful way to allow management to control expenditure.

Point of Use:

“Walk Time”: Where items are kept in a Central Store, employees must go to the Store to retrieve what they need before carrying on their tasks. A recent study at a Boeing Aircraft Maintenance facility in the USA showed that the average Mechanic walked more than 5 Km per day retrieving the tools needed for work, resulting in a significant loss of working time. A study at Tractor manufacturer John Deere showed that, from “tools down” to “tools up”, each trip to the Tool Store “cost” John Deere more than 30 minutes of productive time. Consumables are critical to the Business Process of any organisation, yet they are often poorly controlled, poorly accounted for, and require significant human time and cost to obtain and control. Working with point-of-use inventory management companies from the USA, Sierra Acuity solutions use automatic dispensing machines, tailor made lockers or industrial drawers for high volume, high cost or critical items. The point-of-use machines are computer controlled, and automatically maintain a current stock count. They will also automatically re-order stock when it reaches pre-determined re-order levels. Communication between various machines in the system and to and from Suppliers is via Internet connection. The machines are placed throughout the work area near the workers at the “Point-of-Use” of the stock, minimising retrieval time and meaning that the required items are always close at hand.

BENEFITS

Having the stock always available and within reach has been found worldwide to lead to a reduction in consumption (or waste) of many supplies. The automatic stock count and re-order process eliminates much of the overhead associated with provisioning and stocking the consumables. The dispensing machines are thus proving to be highly successful in providing substantial, continued hard-dollar savings in inventory provisioning and consumption.