February 22, 2016
Client Spotlight: The City of Garden City
Located in Western Kansas, this medium sized city of 31,000 is growing up and sprouting fast. After building a huge, very popular shopping mall complex, a ton of restaurants, hotels, and other shops have bloomed all around it. The city’s Electrical Utilities and Water Division have been keeping busy staying on top of construction, and at the same time maintaining the existing infrastructure. They have a huge warehouse on the east side of town and they already have plans to expand and make it The Central Warehouse for all of the cities various departments, such as waste water and sewer, and even the local zoo and cemetery will eventually store their inventory there.
Recently hired Tyler Patterson, Warehouse Manager, has taken the reins and is guiding the city to become the most efficient warehouse anywhere. Starting with the long warehouse, the bucket trucks would drive in, and the drivers would have to walk along the long shelving units to get to one end or the other, and this was a waste of time and resources, just to get the parts they need. Now, the entire warehouse has been re-designed, and the shelving units have been shortened and turned 90 degrees and now go perpendicular to the truck traffic. As a result, the drivers have short rows to go up and down, and the opening of each row faces the traffic. Instead of losing time walking up and down long aisles, they can navigate quickly through the short rows that are turned towards their truck, and they are on their way to the next job site quickly and efficiently with everything they need.
Tyler has also completed the process of barcoding the parts, and placing labels for the Electrical Division on everything with a designated MAPCON stock number. They can still look up parts based on the old numbering system, but once they start to combine parts from the other various departments, the only way to avoid having the same number refer to 2 different items was to assign everything a generic MAPCON number. Now as new parts are added, they are assigned their new number, given a barcode, and eventually a few years down the road anything without a new barcode label will be suspect as a slow moving part. These parts potentially could be put elsewhere into long term storage, or else identified as no longer needed and taken away so as not to take up valuable shelf space.
We want to congratulate Mike Muirhead, the Public Utilities Director, and his staff at the City of Garden City, for streamlining their process and having the foresight to plan ahead for future growth. It is refreshing to see a customer doing things right, and enjoying the benefits of strategic planning. MAPCON is right there to help them expand and grow and keep track of where everything is being stored and everyone can find it fast when needed.
Muirhead said, "MAPCON was just exactly what we needed to bring us into the 21st century".