Pengo Discovers Not All Shipping Systems Created Equal

Headquarters: Laurens, IA

Industry: Distributor of Attachment Tools for Heavy & Light Construction

Website(s): www.pengoattachments.com

Download the Pengo case study.

Three and a half years ago, shipping staff at the Pengo plants in Iowa and Minnesota were spending two hours every morning, painstakingly leafing through hundreds of pages with a highlighter, marking which orders could be shipped – and they still had to re-punch the information into the computer. As one of many in the list of Paladin Brands, a Dover Corporation company, the consequences for Pengo did not go unnoticed.

And like the proverbial dominoes, the effects rippled throughout the day. “We were having trouble with trucks arriving in the afternoon for product,” says Dave Bailey, business analyst for Pengo. “Sometimes we weren't quite ready because we had to spend two hours in the morning” with a manual process more appropriate for the manual mid-20th century than the digital 21st. It was part of an integrated shipping system whose kinks just never seemed to get ironed out.

And that was before the recession hit. With tougher economic times and leaner organizations, every minute counts even more. Little wonder, then, that one of the world’s largest auger and peripheral manufacturers decided to make a switch just a few months ago. The difference they've seen with the move to InsiteShip from Insite Software is like night and day.

With the new system, it's “a few clicks, we go into the control screen, sort by what is completely ready to ship, and allocate product to what's ready to ship,” says manufacturing manager Gary Heuton, who oversees the shipping department, among his other duties. It takes about 15 minutes rather than the previous two-plus hours, says Bailey, “then we print out three-quarters of a day of shipping.” In fact, “the whole process is more fluid,” says Heuton. “It's much more visible” than the previous system.

He means that literally: “It's easier to see; before we really had no visual format to use to look and verify what was ready.”

Multiple Benefits
The information-at-your-fingertips control screen was a huge initial draw, but both Bailey and Heuton cite numerous other benefits, including greater ease and flexibility in modifying orders, and in handling partial orders, export documents, and EDI interfaces. The stellar customer service has been icing on the cake.

The InsiteShip software allows Pengo to easily and efficiently delete or change orders once in the shipping module, says Bailey. If only one item is in question, staff can go in, modify that item and they're done; the previous system meant deleting the entire order and starting from scratch. Not surprisingly, the time savings have been “dramatic,” says Bailey.

InsiteShip's function as an external integrated “add-on” solution rather than an intrusive modification to SyteLine is key to its flexibility, including its ability to update posting in real time - a feature Bailey notes. It also means nothing slips through the system that shouldn't, for example, shipping to a customer with a credit hold. With InsiteShip, the process can't even begin because such parameters are built into the system. As an add-on, upgrades are also seamless and take a matter of days at most, because there's no need to modify SyteLine source code or synchronize software releases. Pengo hasn't had any upgrades since it switched to InsiteShip, but that's only because “we don't need it. That's the nice part,” Bailey reports.

The real-time posting means Pengo staff can stay on top of the process throughout the day, says Heuton, which wasn't an option under the system that InsiteShip replaced. They know if product is received throughout the day, helping keep track of not only quantity of inventory, but where it's pulled from. “It helps us stay more focused on the just-in-time process,” he says.

That's essential in a hotly competitive environment, with fewer people doing more with less. “Customers want product readily available when they need it. Otherwise, they'll go get it from somebody else. A large focus for our company is on-time delivery; it always has been and always will be. With the InsiteShip system, we have a better focus on that.”

Bailey cites InsiteShip's ability to handle partial orders as another major advantage. Before, says Bailey, Pengo had to have a dedicated staff member just to do UPS and FedEx orders; InsiteShip provided them with a single solution certified by UPS and FedEx to include built-in information for proper labeling, rates and other essential data. Now any staff member shipping parcel or LTL truckloads can simply process these orders and hand it off, he says.

Handling export documents has gone from a major undertaking to an easy automated task as well. Heuton estimates that about 5 to 10 percent of Pengo's business is export – not the lion's share, clearly, but a significant proportion nonetheless. When it took them up to two hours to create an export document, however, questions of cost-benefit were hard to ignore. The previous package generated a basic form that could be edited, but users were left on their own to navigate the highly bureaucratic world of export paperwork, ensuring that every “i” was dotted and “t” crossed.

“Sometimes we had to cobble together documents, whiting out here, typing or writing in there,” says Bailey.

With InsiteShip, the process for all of the international shipments requiring documentation now takes “about 20 minutes or half an hour,” says Heuton. The time saved is only a small part of the headache relief for Pengo; the increased accuracy of the documentation and automated AES (Automated Export System for filing the SED – Shipper’s Export Declaration) submission means that the significant cost of a shipment being delayed in customs is virtually eliminated.

The 800-Pound Gorillas
Because the construction business world revolves around a handful of heavy hitters, ensuring EDI documents are formatted to each company's specifications is critical, says Bailey. To put it bluntly, “If Company X asks us to send them an ASN and wants it to look a certain way, that's what we do,” says Bailey.

Identifying what was in each container turned into another painstaking process under the old system, hand-marking what was in each pallet, then switching to another software system to key in the information, which also opened to the door to errors. Promises of automation never fully materialized.

“Now it's all scannable on an automated printed label -- and it's been working since the day they went live,” says Bailey.

At the End of the Day...
“The end of day now functions as smoothly as the beginning,” says Bailey. Bills of lading require no manual updating and all the other the paperwork is ready when it's time to close a load. “The shipping personnel love it,” says Bailey. Instead of staying late or coming in on Saturday to get caught up, they can leave at 5:30. They're fresher when they are at work, happier to be there, and Pengo is happy to save on the overtime.

In fact, things have gone remarkably smoothly from Day One: “The InSite system delivered on all the presentation promises, and then some. In fact, experience has been positive from the start,” say Bailey and Heuton. They both remark on the time and energy InSite spent in up-front discussions, remotely and on-site, long before the system went live. Insite was able to bring to bear the breadth and depth of its knowledge of the shipping business, but they also worked extensively with Pengo to learn and map out their specific needs to best configure the system for their unique situation, sometimes including innovative solutions for issues that had been flying below Pengo's radar.

“Insite was more than willing to make adjustments and adapt to our requirements and they gave us some new insight in certain screens and paperwork that would help,” says Heuton. When they did go live, because they'd tested extensively, “it was pretty painless,” he says.

“Insite stayed on-site for about three days,” says Heuton, to wrap up the minor issues that remained. That was all that was needed – a far cry from the previous experience with the previous vendor of two or three weeks on-site, six months of back and forth, and “oh, that's coming in the next build,” which moreover, never seemed to quite solve the problem. Additional support is always available, but they haven't needed much, he says.

“I can't say enough – Insite bent over backwards for us, and continues to bend over backwards,” Bailey says. “I feel as though they're a Pengo partner; they're in this with us, and our success is their success too.”

To experience how InsiteShip can revolutionize your business, call 1-866-746-0377 to speak to one of our sales team members.