Exact Commerce, headquartered in Collierville, TN, provides furniture parts for some of the country''s top 10 manufacturers. Parts from Exact''s overseas factories arrive at their centrally located 40,000 sq ft distribution center and administrative facility.
Over the last several years, steady growth in business made space tight in the company''s warehouse. Exact was reaching the point where all of its product could not be adequately stored and efficiently handled within the confines of the building. The company was spending more time trying to work around pallet loads than loading trucks.
In addition, Exact had gone from being a supplier to becoming a manufacturer. Detecting an opportunity in the recreational products market, Exact launched the Legacy brand of billiard tables a few years ago.
"We had been selling parts to the billiard manufacturers, like the table leg and top rails to some of the top manufacturers," says vp operations Alton Brinlee. Concluding they were in effect building complete tables, they developed retail contacts so they could sell the tables themselves. But then the strain of the OEM parts business and the pool tables put Exact behind the eight ball in terms of working area.
"For us, we found the billiard tables took up a lot of our floor space," according to Brinlee. "To come up with more space we were looking at some neighboring property for expansion since we really didn''t want to have to move our facility."
The roughly 30-40,000 sq ft estimated additional space that they were going to need would run into quite an expense. While the company was pondering the expansion, one of its owners, Joe Brunson, spotted an article on the Aisle-Master articulated forklift in a trade magazine and announced, "I think we have the answer."
What attracted his attention was the ability of the Aisle-Master with its articulated forks to handle heavy loads, yet navigate easily within narrower aisles. Narrower aisles mean more racking and storage space can be added to an already stuffed facility.
The unique fork and mast on the Aisle-Master can turn up to 90 deg (both left and right), enabling this heavy-duty vehicle to work easily within the narrower 7 ft aisles. The forklift is driven to the center of the pallet, where the steering wheel directs the mast into the fork pockets. After picking the pallet, the driver reverses out while unwinding the steering wheel without any rear end swing.
Exact''s team had to see how this transformation could be possible and following contact with Aisle-Master factory representative Scott Taylor, Brunson and Brinlee visited a user near Nashville. Seeing the Aisle-Master forklift in action convinced them to forget about the $1.5 million construction project.
Insstead, Exact decided to invest $100,000 in two Aisle-Master forklifts. Once they acquired their first unit, Brinlee set to work rearranging the aisles at Exact to take them down to a 7 ft width. Though driving the Aisle-Master is a change from standard forklifts, the drivers learned how to handle the vehicle in under half a day. An immediate benefit they noticed was the increased visibility offered by the articulated fork design.
"Fortunately we had some floor space," recalls Brinlee, "and we could stack in that open space during the reracking process."
Using the Aisle-Master forklift, Brinlee and the three-person warehouse crew were able to combine the task of rack changes along with their schedule of shipments and deliveries of the pallets and containers. Through a 6-week period they would empty a set of racks, move it, and fill it back up. With 33% more racking, Exact was ready for increasing business as it went along its upward sales curve in much less time than the months it would take to build and reset a new addition.
The building now has 13 rows, 350 ft long, going up to18 ft high. An extended mast on the Aisle-Master forklift takes its reach to the top shelf.
The facility has one big aisle in the center to split the warehouse. This 12 ft aisle runs along about two-thirds of the building, leading to where the trucks are unloaded.
All the inventory comes in through just two dock doors and ships out through another pair. The docks are worked using two small Mitsubishi forklifts to run the short distance into the truck trailers. Running on LPG rather than batteries, the Aisle-Master is available throughout virtually the entire shift, taking a break only when the crew does.
Though primarily used inside the DC, occasionally the Aisle-Master forklift runs outside to where they also store some pallets. The vehicle''s 67 hp GM engine, hydrostatic drive, and solid pneumatic rear tires enables the forklift to make those trips quickly and easily.
By purchasing the Aisle-Master forklifts rather than putting money into new construction, Exact was able to show an instant payback of over 10 to 1 on equipment they would have needed in the first place for an expanded facility, plus they were able to relieve the pressure of handling the higher flow of products by doing it much faster.