Successful implementation of ISASTORE® at Partmaster, Howick

Partmaster, a member of the AFGRI Group, started business over twenty years ago as an engineering firm and manufacturer of agricultural machinery, trading as Falcon Engineering. As the manufacturing division expanded, the company was renamed Falcon Equipment. Whilst creating an efficient parts logistics system for its own machines, Falcon recognised a growing need in the farming community for a reliable source of supply that could provide the parts required for other brands of farm equipment. Eventually a separate parts division was formed as Falcon Agriparts. An extensive Dealer network was established and the variety of parts grew to cover a wider and wider range of equipment.
A partnership was formed with international parts suppliers, The Kramp Group. This meant that the venture now had access to the enormous range of agricultural parts supplied by Kramp, sourced from the World's leading manufacturers. The scale of the Kramp operation meant that the best quality parts were available at very competitive prices. The parts business had, by now, grown to be considerably bigger than the manufacturing division so it was renamed Kramp South Africa.
In October 2004 the new name was announced for South Africa's leading wholesaler of agricultural replacement parts. The Partmaster name and distinctive Partmaster logo is set to become the best-known trademark in the field. This is not a new company, just a new name; to better reflect the type of operation that it is engaged in.
At a time when short delivery times, speed and reliability are more important than ever, efficient logistical facilities are of the essence.  The 2500 square meter Partmaster warehouse in Howick employs state-of-the-art logistical techniques to ensure customers receive consistently superior service, time after time. All daily orders received before 4 pm by the highly qualified telesales team are packed and dispatched on the same day to an extensive dealer network of more than 1000 Retail outlets.

To improve operations and customer service, as well as to be prepared for the expected future growth, Partmaster decided in 2006 to entrust Supply Chain Navigators with the delivery and implementation of the warehouse management system ISASTORE®.
In a fist step a system specification workshop took place at Partmaster. The aim was to document and exactly define the operational processes, the current and intended material flows, as well as the lay-out of the interface to the existing ERP system SYSPRO®.
In a second step the barcode labelling of the storage locations and all products was completed. As barcodes where required for the daily operations, they also made the process of initial stock migration into ISASTORE® a lot easier.
The programming of the interface to SYSPRO® and the intensive testing was successfully completed well in time for ‘go live’ with the WMS.
Virtually ‘over night’, 18 employees had to change over to work with ISASTORE® on PCs and R/F Scanners.
A good indicator, of having efficient tools on hand to process the daily tasks in the warehouse, is the receiving area. Always deemed ‘to small’ – the receiving bays are now mainly empty, as shorter process times enable a speedy product to storage location cycle.
Already on the second day of going ‘live’ with the new WMS the pick performance could be significantly improved, compared to pre-implementation figures.
Not even touching the extensive optimisation potential of ISASTORE® yet, giving the WMS a short period of time to gather the required data, Partmaster was able to ‘fine tune’ its operations further. This resulted in achieving higher throughput and performance through the set-up of intelligent operational strategies that allow ISASTORE® to ‘drive’ the warehouse processes.  
The implementation of the WMS ISASTORE® including complete stock migration and user training was achieved in only two weeks. The clients highly motivated staff, an experienced implementation team and the profile-based structure of the software where key to the success of the Project, thus, avoiding a lengthy ‘implementation period’.

www.partmaster.co.za