What is kitting?

One of Shippers Automotive’s customers, for example, assembles truck dashboards. Without kitting, the required materials to make dashboards generally arrive separately as they are channeled off of trucks, into warehouses, and out to the customer’s manufacturing plant. Unpacking and organizing all the parts in the plants takes up valuable time and space.
With kitting, Shippers Automotive:

• Pre-packages all the materials that workers in the manufacturing plant need to assemble each individual dashboard, putting them into individual kits. The kits are like Lego sets, just a lot larger and heavier.
• The parts are organized within the kits in sequence. That way, assembly-line workers can pull out each part in order of need without having to unpack everything at once, wasting valuable time and space. (Can Lego beat that?)

Customized Software that fits Shippers Automotive’s needs

A lot of logistics-software companies, especially the large, corporate operations, compel the customer to adapt to their system. SC Codeworks prides itself on customizing software to meet the precise needs of the customer.
For Shippers Automotive, that means software that sequences the arrival, cataloging, and retrieval of materials needed to assemble the manufacturing kits. The myriad benefits of SC Codeworks’ software are best summed up with the word that defines any profitable business: efficiency.
Specific benefits include:

• Fewer pallets pulled per kit.
• Sequencing the kit assembly in a Just In Time manner. This means the materials arrive precisely as they’re needed. They aren’t either:

        ❌ Held up in the supply chain, delaying the kitting process
        ❌ Sitting idle, taking up warehouse space.

“That wasn’t an off-the-shelf solution,” Chris Watkins, vice president of operations at Shippers Automotive, said of the bespoke software SC Codeworks built for the company.
SC Codeworks, Watkins said, was “able to customize things for us and understand and adapt to our business needs without having this massive amount of red tape to go through. It was very quick, very cost-effective.”

SC Codeworks’ software solutions allow Shippers Automotive to:

• Better direct workflow, making workers more productive
• Turn over their inventory every 30 days, maximizing their warehouse real estate
• Keep better tabs on the supply chain
• Identify areas for improved efficiency.

Before Shippers Automotive started providing assembly kits for their manufacturing customers, Watkins said, “We would walk into their assembly plant and there was material everywhere. We gave them the ability to get real estate back.”
Success spawned more success:

• SC Codeworks helped duplicate Shippers Automotive’s kitting efforts at multiple warehouses and with multiple customers.
• Armed with knowledge of all Shippers Automotive’s facilities, SC Codeworks has been able to suggest further ways to improve the company’s operations and become an even more well-oiled machine

Coding In Real Time

When Shippers Automotive set up a new facility in Ohio, they had a shoestring budget and a looming deadline. Their customer needed the facility up and running in two weeks flat to support an automotive assembly line. No pressure!

SC Codeworks rushed experts to the facility and had them coding on-site even as workers were setting up the facility and hauling in the supplies.

Crucially, this facility demanded software tailored to an inventory model, as opposed to a license-plate model. In an inventory model, the software only knows the location of specific boxes. For a license-plate model, software has to be able to identify the precise contents of a box, down to the item level.

“They did that on the fly,” Watkins said of the on-site coders.

A Cascading Return On Investment

Shippers Automotive’s pitch to their own customers is that kitting should provide a return on investment in under 12 months.

Other benefits of kitting:

• Saves valuable space in manufacturing facilities
• Allows expansion of the manufacturing footprint
• Speeds up production lines

SC Codeworks provides Shippers Automotive with its own ROI
“Our own costs may increase, but we’re charging the customer more,” said Watkins.

From one small, personable company to another

Compared with its competitors, Shippers Automotive is a tidy operation, with only about 350 employees. But their smaller size is their superpower. It allows them to provide the personal touch that corporate behemoths lack.

“For us, it’s a personal relationship with the customers,” said Watkins. “We’re partners with them, they know us. We pride ourselves on our culture of how we treat our employees, how we treat our customers.”

This puts Shippers Automotive good company with SC Codeworks, which holds a comparable business philosophy: treating their customers like one of the family.