UMC Mukilteo, Washington MORE WORK IN LESS TIME UMC’s campus has three buildings and hundreds of employees working to support the projects and teams out in the field. Each jobsite needs to have consumables, equipment, and materials delivered daily so that teams can stay on the established timelines. “Our biggest challenge is just trying to get material to jobsites in a timely manner,” said Footer. “What we were noticing initially was, with the amount of work in the area, our vendors were having a hard time keeping up, and it would take them up to a couple weeks to complete some of our tool requests. So we were looking for any sort of an edge to help with that process.” According to Footer, jobsites have to adjust priorities constantly because what was planned the night before can change by the morning. For example, if they were going to pour concrete but conditions have changed, they have to be ready and able to work on something else. “Our growth has gone up substantially in the last year and a half,” said Tom Donaldson, UMC’s supply chain manager. “We’ve seen the requirement for more support. The result of that is the field has more needs in a quicker timeframe, and we as a result have to respond to those needs.” LOOKING FOR EFFICIENCIES With the increased demand and desire for tight timelines, delays couldn’t be tolerated. UMC decided it needed to look for ways to improve the supply chain and make sure supplies flowed from the warehouse to the jobsites with as little downtime as possible. After some research, they brought in “a couple different vendors” before doing a test run with Fastenal. “With Fastenal, we saw an opportunity with a large corporation,” said Donaldson. “Having a background myself in wholesale management and supply chain management, I recognized the fact that there was a lot of opportunity with efficiency, with support, and with technology, which was big for us.” In the initial phase, Fastenal brought in only a handful of products including a few ladders, some core tools, and a scanner to issue items to each jobsite. This allowed UMC to better track costs for each of their contracts, an increasingly critical function as the pace and scope of their business expands. “When Fastenal approached us about helping us out and what they could do for us, we actually started out fairly small,” said Footer. “We brought in consignment. We had just a shelf or two, just to see how the program would work. And it actually worked out so well we decided that we would give them more space in our building.” ELEMENTS OF EFFICIENCY VENDING UMC workers at both the fabrication shops and the jobsites can vend supplies whenever needed, and the data from those transactions flows to a cloud-based reporting dashboard. Fastenal employees refill the machines before anything runs out. FEWER POs UMC’s supply chain team processed 40,000 POs (from all vendors) in the last full year before partnering with Fastenal. Now, that number has been reduced by more than 5,000. ONSITE BRANCH Home to more than $300K worth of consigned inventory and three Fastenal employees, this in-house “Fastenal branch” enables the UMC team to focus more resources on building. SUPPLIER SUPPORT Fastenal offers product demos and consultations so that UMC is always aware of what’s available in the tool world. They no longer have to do separate research; the options and information are brought to them. B2B INTEGRATION By integrating UMC and Fastenal’s software systems, all vended transactions and orders filled by Fastenal are itemized by project and automatically aggregated to create a single weekly electronic invoice.
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