Background
Walser Reconditioning Center, which serves dealerships that prepare used cars for resale, with the business growth, they were considering building a new facility for its work. To ensure maximum utility from the new building, the owner decided that only 57 square meters of the 8,361 square meters is used for a car reconditioning parts storage. The center has to go for a new storage way, after investigation, they decide to go with Modula VLM vertical storage system to store the bulk of its auto parts inventory. Doing so not only saved space, its easy and fast parts retrieval system helped production to meet tight deadlines for their operations.
Pain Points
A small footprint for thousands of parts storages in an automotive reconditioning center
The Walser group of car dealerships had previously done reconditioning work in separate dealerships in Minnesota and Kansas, but they decided to consolidate all operations in one location. Their process for reconditioning involves passing a car through 35 stages of inspection and reconditioning. The whole process has to complete in no more than five days. One of the key factors in meeting that deadline is having parts on hand for the work in no time. Some parts will be sent to dealers or to customers who lives far from the reconditioning center.
With their previous manual shelves storage system, operators have to walk around to search parts on shelves and sometimes need to climb up and down, efficiency is low. With the new facility, the management team decided to give no more than 57 square meters space for parts storage. Says Steve Davis, the center’s general manager, “If we were going to put $800,000 of auto parts into 57 square meters, we needed a different option.”
Solution
A Modula vertical storage system connected to the organisation’s ERP for auto parts storage consolidation.
Davis had been a fan of a vertical storage system for auto parts, and he and his team had worked in the past with the Modula IT team for computer-related work. He knew that a vertical lift module would be a great way to solve their headache. “We looked at all competitors in the market and we felt that Modula had the best solution for our condition here. The pricing, how fast it could be built, and the support they have is great.”
One single Modula VLM ML 25D has met all their needs: The unit is 8.2 meters tall with the coverage of 14.3 square meters ground space but housed over 200,000 parts for the center to serve dealers and customers in addition to the reconditioning operation.
An employee at the stock counter can be talking to a customer on the phone and retrieve the part by walking less than 3 meters to the Modula VLM. In the past, that employee would have to walk for 12.2 meters or more to search of the part. Training of VLM can be done in less than an hour.
The Walser team says there’s been “a massive increase in employee productivity” and it’s far easier now to meet that five-day turnaround time for reconditioning vehicles. Moreover, they loved how easy the machine is to learn. Steve Davis said, “I can have someone trained within an hour, from the most basic to the more complex items.”
