Terex

Headquartered in Westport Connecticut, Terex Corporation may not be such a well-known name, but if your company has ever rented an aerial working platform (a scissor-lift or similar), there is a good chance it was manufactured by Terex and dispatched to the rental company from its transfer center in North Bend, Washington.

The North Bend facility is always full of lifting equipment. The company makes most pieces to order and customizes them to meet customers' unique preferences. Terex maintained a manual system for yard management at the transfer centre, which generated excessive costs for what should have been a relatively simple process of locating customers' units to prepare them for delivery.

The Supply Chain Cost Reduction Challenge:A wallboard and sticker system was a low-tech solution for identifying equipment items in the yard at Terex. While inexpensive in itself, the solution cost around six minutes every time an employee had to locate a unit in the yard. It also required a considerable number of hours to be spent each month taking physical inventories and updating the company's ERP platform.

The Path to Cost Reduction:Terex decided to replace the outdated manual yard management process with a new, digital solution using RFID tracking. Terex decided to replace the outdated manual yard management process with a new, digital solution using RFID tracking. Decision-makers chose a yard management software (YMS) product, and then had the transfer centre surveyed before initiating a pilot project covering a small portion of the yard.

After a successful pilot, the company approved the solution for full-scale implementation, replacing stickers, yard maps, and wallboard with electronic tracking and digital inventory management. As of December 2017, Terex was planning to integrate the yard management solution with its ERP platform to enable even greater functionality.

Supply Chain Cost Management Results:While the YMS cannot reconcile inventory automatically with the Terex ERP application, it does at least provide a daily inventory count via its business intelligence module. That alone has saved the labour costs previously incurred in carrying out manual counts.

More importantly, though, the RFID-based unit identification and location processes have saved the company around 70 weeks per year in labour costs, by cutting the process-time down from six minutes, to a mere 30 seconds per unit.

QUESTION: How does terex impact the rest of supply chain/logistics activities