Cross Company Case Study
Case Study:
CROSS COMPANY
Overview
Established in 1954, Cross Company is a multifaceted, niche-focused industrial technology company headquartered in Greensboro, North Carolina. It operates five divisions – Automation, Precision Measurement, Process Solutions, Hose & Fittings, and Mobile Systems Integration – that collectively produce, distribute and maintain all of the complex components that keep industrial facilities running.
Industry
Industrial Technology & Products
Rapidly captured accurate dimension and weight data for thousands of items
ERP
NetSuite
Website
www.crossco.com
Benefits & Key Outcomes
Highlighted Solution:
ShipHawk Dimensioner
Optimized cube utilization and warehouse storage in a vertical lift machine (VLM)
Combination of ShipHawk Dimensioner and VLM reduced pick time for work orders by 30 minutes
99.97% inventory accuracy due to the combination of ShipHawk’s WMS and Dimensioner, as well as the VLM
Challenge
Leadership recognized an opportunity to install a Vertical Lift Machine (VLM), a type of Automated Storage and Retrieval System (AS/RS), to optimize the facility’s existing space, but without accurate product dimensions and weights, the VLM wouldn’t be fully effective. With thousands of SKUs, the time it would take to manually collect the weights and dimensions of each item was cost and resource-prohibitive.
The Cross team is always innovating to put reliable products into the hands of its customers fast, even when accommodating requests for extremely specialized solutions. The Greensboro facility, which originally served as a pick-pack-ship warehouse operation, began to scale its on-site manufacturing capabilities to better serve its customers but the limited size of the campus presented a dilemma. It either needed to expand or find a way to improve warehouse cube utilization to not only include space for traditional order fulfillment but also leave plenty of room for expanding production capacity.
Solution
Cross found exactly what they needed with ShipHawk Dimensioner, a handheld dimensioner solution that streamlines the process of collecting weights and dimensions. Moving thousands of products into a VLM is no small feat and it’s even more complex for companies like Cross that work with thousands of parts, of extreme size differences and irregularly shaped. The Cross team used ShipHawk Dimensioner to gather dimensions and load thousands of products into the VLM in just three months, bringing the storage system to nearly 90% of its capacity. “This was our first time using a dimensioner and it worked great. We used it to get everything into the vertical without any issues,” said Ryan Edwards, Warehouse Manager at Cross Company.
The dimensioner’s 3D sensors enabled Cross to capture accurate weights and dimensions with the click of a button and seamlessly sync the data to NetSuite, eliminating the need for time-consuming and error-prone manual processes involving tape measures and bulky and costly legacy dimensioner systems. “The dimension data syncs over to NetSuite correctly without any issues,” said Edwards. The solution made it easy for the team to quickly determine the optimal layout for the VLM, streamline its putaway processes and optimize its warehouse layout.
The project has been a big success for Cross because it’s enabled the company to expand beyond traditional pick-pack-ship processes to support in-house manufacturing workflows and reduced the time it takes to pull parts for work orders by about 30 minutes, continued Edwards.
The team is looking forward to using Dimensioner to next improve their shipping process by efficient cartonization of parcel and less than truckload (pallet) shipments, which will reduce shipping costs.