Receiving, verifying and stocking products into your warehouse takes time and effort. Whether you track it or not, there's a cost involved in each of those activities. The costs climb even higher when manufacturers send you the wrong products, make mistakes on packing slips (or include packing slips that are confusing and hard to read) or when production delays force your customers to wait for products on back-order. On the other hand, when manufacturers ship products accurately and package them so their shipments to you are easy to identify and verify, it reduces errors and speeds your receiving process, which lowers your handling costs.

Weiler Corporation's investment in a state-of-the-art shipping system minimizes your time and costs associated with receiving products into inventory. The fully automated, pick-to-light system utilizes radio frequency technology and a sophisticated quality assurance process in which every order is checked and double-checked for accuracy.

Before shipments leave its dock, Weiler labels all product boxes with the part number, description and bar code, reducing the time you spend in verification.

"For every order we pick, one person picks it using our automated system and another person checks it," explains Jim Teeple, Weiler's vice president of manufacturing. Before shipments leave its dock, Weiler labels all product boxes with the part number, description and bar code, reducing the time you spend in verification. As a result, Weiler shipments are 99%+ accurate. Accurate shipments eliminate time and costs involved in fixing errors, correcting invoices and arranging returns. It's just one way this brush and abrasives manufacturer helps distributors improve their profitability.

Easy-to-identify packaging is another. To speed the induction process for your warehouse crew, all Weiler product boxes are labeled with the part number, description and bar code. On multi-box shipments, a carton content label includes your purchase order and bar codes for each item in the shipping carton, reducing the effort involved in verification.

In response to distributor suggestions, Weiler even switched from using those annoying "peanuts" as packing material. Instead, a more efficient and less messy air pad system protects product during shipment. "The peanuts created a lot of waste problems for distributors," says Teeple. "So, we went to the most efficient-state-of-the-art dunnage."

The Weiler shipping department also has its own emergency generator back-up system. Customer service computers and the shipping department are connected to a diesel generator, so even if electric service goes down in a severe winter snowstorm or other power outage, Weiler keeps shipping orders.