Case Study: Johnson Controls Is Getting A Charge Out Of CribMaster

By WinWare

The Battery Group is the largest supplier of automotive batteries in North America. It makes batteries under nine name brands for customers such as AutoZone, Interstate Battery, Sears, Wal-Mart and CostCo. Johnson Controls started using the CribMaster Inventory Management System in October 1999 because the company needed to get control of where its MRO inventory was going and how it was being used. The system they had in place wasn't efficient or cost-effective. "We would just give (inventory items) away. If they came three times a day, we just let them have it," explained Marie McDaniel, plant buyer/purchasing agent for the Battery Group. With about 520 workers in the assembly-line production area, that clearly was not the best way to do business.

So Johnson Controls began using CribMaster, Windows-based software designed specifically to manage inventory in manufacturing plants. Cribmaster allowed McDaniel, the plant's five toolcrib attendants and six engineers to organize and keep track of the approximately 850,000 MRO inventory items in the plant's toolcrib. About 90 percent of the inventory are nonreturnable machine parts – motors, sprockets, hydraulic motors, pumps. The rest includes paint, paper items, drill bits, fuses, and anything else that might be needed on the assembly line. The items are bar-coded and listed in the CribMaster database. Each employee also has a barcode designation.

Say an employee needs a motor to drive a conveyor belt. The worker goes to the toolcrib and tells the attendant what he or she needs. The attendant either keys by hand or uses a hand-held radio-frequency scanner to scan the bar code on the motor and the bar code assigned to each employee. In seconds, the transaction is complete – it's become part of the CribMaster database. "Issuing by employee is a big advantage to me, where you can keep track," McDaniel said. But that's just the start.