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Lincoln Electric, headquartered
in Cleveland, Ohio, is the world leader in the design
and manufacture of arc welding products, robotic welding
systems, environmental systems, plasma and oxyfuel cutting
equipment. Lincoln Electric implemented Catalyst WMS at
their Cleveland facility in December, 1998. The Cleveland
facility runs two shifts of 10-12 hours each, with over
35 people working per shift. This site inventories over
20,000 SKU’s, including wire, welders, rods, flux,
and consumables, and receives 70 and ships about 70 trailers
per day.
Physically, the site covers 450,000 square feet. The warehouse
is zoned by product type, such as motors, welders, consumables
and build-to-order merchandise. Storage media includes
pallet rack locations and bulk pallet lane positions.
For bulk locations, product moves, such as picks and puts,
are verified through RF entry of location codes. RF verification
of moves in and out of pallet racking is confirmed via
scan of the location.
Efficient Receiving and Putaway
Receipts arrive from manufacturing to one of seven inbound
docks. Lincoln Electric’s SAP manufacturing system
builds trailer loads at the plant and downloads the expected
trailer contents to Catalyst for warehouse receiving.
At Cleveland, a two-step inbound receiving process is
employed. At the dock, all pallets are off loaded and
bulk received by load. Then, an employee RF identifies,
receives and stages the product. Another employee is directed
to putaway the product in a WMS selected location. RF
putaways are interleaved with other warehousing tasks.
Order Processing, Picking and Shipping
Orders are selected for inclusion into a wave based upon
user-defined criteria, including transportation mode by
shipper number. Generally, a wave equals a truck at Lincoln,
but they also build waves for rush orders and UPS orders.
All pick activity is by order and RF dispatched by zone,
47% of picks are performed at the case level with the
remaining 53% full pallet. Lincoln also supports a build-to-order
operation for certain customers, such as nuclear and bonded
product for the military. These operations require the
WMS to direct RF picking of specific lots of material
in the warehouse and includes RF capture of certain product’s
serial numbers. When picking is completed, the WMS RF
directs the staging of products based upon transportation
mode. Staged containers are then loaded and the outbound
paperwork, including BOL and HAZMAT, is generated. The
Cleveland site ships to Home Depot, Lowes and Wal-Mart,
their own 200-400 distributors and also re-supplies other
Lincoln Electric distribution centers. The distribution
center ships an average of 2,000 orders per day at 3-6
order-lines per order. These products are shipped 40%
TL, 56% LTL, and 4% parcel. Replenishments are RF directed
and typically performing during the morning shift.
Technology and Integration
Lincoln Electric installed Catalyst’s WMS Version
7.1 running on an IBM RS/6000 with Oracle RDBMS and Telxon
RF terminals. The Catalyst system is interfaced to a SAP
host ERP system. |
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Benefits
Received and Future Plans
Implementing Catalyst has benefited Lincoln Electric at
Cleveland in the following ways: |
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Paperwork and data entry have been
nearly eliminated. Now everything is real-time. |
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Greatly improved their outbound
efficiencies through wave planning. |
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Improved discipline and inventory
control through use of real-time task direction. |
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Reduced order cycle time from 4
days to 2 days. |
| Lincoln Electric also
has the Catalyst WMS running in their Atlanta distribution
center and plans to implement WMS at two more facilities
in Chicago and New Jersey. |
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Adobe
Acrobat Reader |
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Installer |
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To properly view the downloadable
files on this page, it is necessary to have a version
of Adobe Acrobat installed onto your computer. If
you do not already have this application, a free
version is available for download above. |
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