Inventory Tracking Solution Allows for Real-Time Visibility Across All Levels of Business

Hisco is a leader in supply chain solutions and a specialty distribution company serving the electronic assembly, aerospace and defense, medical, electronics, and other industrial markets. Hisco delivers documented value to customers through quality products, process solutions, and documented cost savings. In addition, Hisco specializes in warehousing for cold storage and vendor managed inventory services.

Legacy Vendor Managed Inventory solutions require a tremendous amount of manual overhead. Suppliers need to provide on-site resources or visit customer sites consistently to cycle count and replenish out-of-stock items.  

Hisco’s challenges included:  

• Assessing existing inventory levels on location at customer sites is labor intensive, requires travel, logistics and planning.  
• Overall lack of visibility to inventory consumption, expiring materials and inventory levels result in product shortages and missed production cycles.  
• Time-intensive manual cycle-counting of inventory at individual customer sites is hard to scale and maintain.  
• The process to update Hisco business system to bill customers for consumed sites was manual and prone to errors.  
• Stock room process for managing valuable storage space was not optimized.

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Hisco turned to Xemelgo to design a sensor-based solution to allow them to track inventory levels across all their customer sites in real-time. This allows Hisco to monitor and replenish their customer’s inventory levels remotely and ensure their customers have supplies needed to maintain their tight production schedules.

“Hisco was looking for a touchless, automated solution for tracking inventory from the VMI tool crib to the manufacturing floor. By partnering with Xemelgo we can deliver a seamless solution that tracks inventory, expiration dates and sends real time alerts right to the smart device 24x7. Xemelgo and our RFID solution has paved the way for new opportunities making it easier for our customers to do business with Hisco,” said Nelson Picard, VP of Operations at Hisco Inc.

Outcomes

• Minimize travel to customer sites. Real-time alerts notify Hisco team members when customer inventory items are running low, allowing for efficient management and calibration of production, consumption, and storage levels.
• Cycle counting customer site in minutes with a handheld reader. 85% reduction in time completing inventory audits while enhancing view of clients’ purchase history and reduction of on-site staff.
• Revenue growth. Reduction of manual intensive tasks enabling the redeployment of staff to revenue generating responsibilities.
• Automatic update of the Hisco business system. Hisco has digitally transformed its Vendor Managed Inventory offering allowing it to provide a best-in-class value-added managed services to its clients.
• Real-Time alerts for expiring items. Hisco can track excess or soon to be expired items and load balance them to other sites that consume those same items more frequently.

• Drive down cost and better pricing for customer. Win new business by offering customers a consumption-based pricing model.
• Machine learning can predict future consumption. Increased revenue and margins by efficiently tracking best-selling items and minimizing overstock of lesser used items.  

To learn more about Xemelgo’s Inventory Tracking Application email contact@xemelgo.com or visit Xemelgo at Automation Alley’s Industry 4.0 conference, Integr8, on May 10 at Suburban Collection Showplace in Novi.

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