Inventory Management Benefits

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The ACTIVE ADVANTAGE!

Reduce Procurement Costs

This seems relatively easy, but you try vetting at least three suppliers, adding duplicate domestic suppliers to back up our overseas suppliers. Also, visit all of your overseas plants every two years. Lastly, provide quality to the level of 243 parts per million. All of it in your piece price. That’s what we do at Active.

For every one of our customers, we find the best factory in the world to make it. For custom items, we have samples made for you, we check the documentation, check the measurements, and provide them to you for you to review. We visit each one of our overseas factories no less than every two years.

Last year, we bought and sent our customers nearly 1 billion small parts. We believe that all of these services are in the invoice cost, and that generally they are cheaper than you are paying.

Lower Inventory Cost

When we purchase inventory for you, we work with you to determine what your usages are and we provide them to you when you need them. Since we are buying from many factories and we include your volume in our total volume, we can buy more from fewer factories and get lower pricing. Also, we are importing nearly one container a week. This allows us to consolidate our freight resulting in lower costs, which we pass on to you.

Reduce On-Hand Inventory, Reduce Material Handling, Reduce Warehouse Space Needs, Increase Inventory Turns

We offer many Inventory Programs including JIT, Kan Ban, and Consignment. All of these have different results, but each one of these results in reduced on-hand inventory, reduced warehouse space needs (freeing it up for value added manufacturing) and increase your inventory turns.

Several of our customers have signed up for one of our Consignment Programs. They have been able to shift several hundred thousand dollars of inventory off their books, send the inventory to us, and increase their inventory turns. We set up shipments, based on your usage, to replenish, but in the main, consignment customers don’t pay until a significant time has passed from when they used the product.

You do the math. If your cost of capital is 15% and if you could free up $200,000 of inventory, you would save $30,000 of interest to be invested in other value added projects. You would also have extra floor space. Your CFO will love you.

Identify Obsolete Inventory and Eliminate Stock Outs

Managing all of those small parts is a thankless job and no one wants to do it. (Except us.) When you commit to an Estimated Annual Usage with us, we make sure you are responsible for no more than you commit to. We manage the purchasing, cost, and holding. You focus on what you do, making products.

How much inventory of small parts did you throw away last year? How many times did you run out of something?

Identify Standardization Opportunities

We’re experts in manufacturing. All of our top people are manufacturing people first, who feel lucky to spend the best part of their days walking slowly around factories. During these walks we are constantly looking and asking questions.

We look for common parts, for other times we have seen something similar and constantly making recommendations. We will take every item you make, lay them out, see what makes sense and make recommendations to you on making two parts turn into one.

Bigger volume on one part reduces cost and the number of items you may need. Less handling, less space, less confusion.

Right Size Factory Staff

Finding someone to manage your small parts business is difficult. You know, it looks like something you could buy at your local home improvement store or hardware store, but, it really is a very small sophisticated piece of equipment, that purchased by the wrong hands could shut your factory down.

We staff our company with people who care about the product and are experts in it. In every case, we have found time for your people to concentrate on the work that will make you money, not another person who needs to be supervised. We do it for you!