Three years ago when Chad Treadwell, vice president of operations, arrived at Ever Win International Corp. (City of Industry, CA), the manufacturer and distributor of cell phones and accessories shipped 7,000 units per day from a paper-based warehouse to a customer list consisting primarily of small and mid-size organizations. Today the company ships 150,000 units per day from a larger, state-of-the-art automated warehouse, and the order mix is now dominated by large customers such as top tier wireless carriers and retailers. As a result, annual sales have risen significantly at the privately held company. The transformation at Ever Win was made possible by a warehouse management system (WMS) from Radio Beacon Inc. (Toronto), which links to a MAS 500 accounting system from Best Software Inc. (Irvine, CA). Both were installed with the help of Business Accounting Solutions Enterprise (BASE, Los Angeles), a systems integrator, and workflow planner Dale Robertson of Impact (Toronto), a material handling company. The WMS automates an array of warehouse activities including receiving, put-away, tracking, picking, packing and shipping. In addition, it provides real-time updates of order and inventory information and supports a custom packaging operation. The latter consists of several assembly lines and three radio frequency sealing machines, where Ever Win personnel insert phones into brand-identifying packaging and apply brand labels to batteries. One of the most important features of the WMS is the ability to track product by serial number. The serial number tracking capability simplifies the returns process and helps Ever Win provide better customer service. Tracking by serial number is especially important with a volatile inventory like cell phones. That's because new models are launched and discontinued so frequently that the warehouse holds a completely different array of models every 12 to 18 months. "In a fast moving industry where products change regularly, you have to be able to reorganize the warehouse very quickly," explains Dale Jeffries, president of Radio Beacon. Both the WMS and accounting systems are based on the Microsoft Windows operating system and Microsoft SQL Server database platform and have proved to be highly scalable. That's good since the Ever Win warehouse has more than tripled in size from 15,000 to 51,000 square feet and the number of units shipped per day has skyrocketed nearly 22-fold since Treadwell arrived in mid-2001. DROWNING IN PAPER
"We had to completely overhaul our process," Treadwell reports. The former paper-based system involved hand carrying paperwork between the office and the warehouse. When an order came in, it would be keyed into the Sage system, an accounting application since acquired by Best Software, printed out and carried to the warehouse for picking. "Our goal was to increase efficiency, decrease shrink and increase order accuracy," says Treadwell. Results have been dramatic. Order picking time has dropped from nearly half an hour to five minutes. Order accuracy has climbed from about 85% to 99.9%. Shipping problems have virtually disappeared, and shrink (or lost inventory) has shrunk to less than 1%. "We've gained a lot of efficiencies," says Treadwell. "The integrated WMS and accounting systems and process re-engineering have allowed us to keep up with growth in the business," he adds. "We knew there were big customers out there," says Treadwell. "They liked us, but they would look at our operation and say, 'It needs to be more automated,'" he recalls. "Now when we show [prospective] customers our operation and they see our level of automation, they are a lot more confident in our ability to ship product when they need it," he explains. BASE installed the Radio Beacon WMS first to provide stock locating capability. "Initially, we typed orders into the system," recalls Treadwell. Orders would be input into Sage and re-keyed into the Radio Beacon WMS. About four months after initial deployment, BASE installed the MAS 500 accounting system. About four months after that, the two systems were integrated and manual data entry became obsolete. Between implementation stages Ever Win personnel concentrated on testing and training. Since data entry now relies on bar code scanning, data entry is virtually real time and error-free. Not only has accuracy improved, but paper filing has been eliminated, freeing personnel for other tasks. Automating data entry generates immediate benefits. "There are dramatic improvements once data starts flowing in," says Jeffries. For example, since incoming product is scanned as it comes off the truck, the system knows it's available to fulfill sales as much as a day earlier. This reduces inventory by a day. "If you have 12 turns per year, you just saved 1/20 of inventory," explains Jeffries. At many companies attempting such a transformation, the accounting package is installed first. But in Ever Win's case, automating the warehouse was such a priority that the company specified integration with a WMS when looking for an accounting package and installed the WMS first. Since Radio Beacon builds its product with interfaces to various accounting packages including MAS 500, it was a natural choice. Interfaces between applications are especially important to smaller companies like Ever Win. Often smaller firms don't have sufficient in-house IT resources to do their own programming, plus "they want to start using the product [immediately]," says Jeffries. Smaller companies also want tangible results and quick implementation. "If an implementation takes more than 45 days, the customer begins to feel you are wasting their money," he adds. The phased implementation at Ever Win "allowed us to isolate each system so we could determine where we had issues. This was completely new for us-so we really wanted to make sure we knew where the issues were before we integrated the systems together," explains Treadwell. "It was scary going into the integration," he admits. As it turned out, going live with the integrated systems "went much better than anyone anticipated," he reports, noting, "We did a lot of testing before actually flipping the switch." In fact, the test phase lasted for roughly three months. Automating the warehouse and installing the new accounting system definitely came with a learning curve, so training was essential. "Getting used to the system and breaking old habits was the biggest challenge," says Treadwell. Now "everyone is pretty passionate about using the system and processes," he reports. ORDER FULFILLMENT
Under Ever Win's new, automated process, orders from major wireless carrier customers arrive via e-mail or fax and are input by sales personnel into the MAS 500 system. Orders from retailers are received via electronic data interchange and go directly into the MAS 500 system, as do orders received via customer Websites. "We do Web fulfillment for a number of customers," explains Treadwell. Most of these Website-generated orders are for single units. The MAS 500 system transmits order information to the Radio Beacon WMS, which generates pick lists. A wireless local area network (WLAN) downloads pick information to handheld scanner-equipped data collection terminals from Intermec Technologies Corp. (Everett, WA). Workers pick inventory and scan bar codes to confirm the proper item was selected. Then pick data is transmitted back through the WLAN to the WMS. The WMS debits inventory, generates shipping labels and Advance Ship Notices and transmits information on shipped orders back to the MAS 500 system for invoicing. "This allows invoices to be generated the same day," reports Treadwell. The company's factory in China produces product as specified by purchase orders issued by headquarters personnel. When product arrives from China, it is matched to the purchase order residing in the MAS 500 system. Before it is put away in the warehouse, bar code labels are prepared on printers from Intermec and Zebra Technologies (Vernon Hills, IL), hand applied and scanned so items can be identified by the system and tracked in real time. BIG SAVINGS
Next on Treadwell's agenda is to integrate the Radio Beacon WMS with Clippership from Kewill Systems plc (Marlborough, MA), a Windows-based application that can manage transportation requirements including e-manifesting, compliance label generation and reporting. Ever Win will use it to manage courier shipments and complement the Radio Beacon's handling of less-than-truckload and truckload shipping. Now up and running for roughly two years, the integrated WMS/accounting system has allowed Ever Win to recoup the $500,000 it invested in 2001 and 2002 in software licenses, integration assistance, and supporting hardware including 10 handhelds, six label printers and the WLAN. Best of all, its warehouse has been transformed from pencil and paper to automatic data entry and product can be tracked from the moment it arrives to the moment it departs.