Case Study - L3 Communications

Picture having enough inventory to fill 10 rows of shelves equaling about 1,800 square feet. Now imagine putting all that inventory into a storage unit with a footprint of merely 160 square feet. That’s exactly what a Melbourne, Florida communications hardware provider did.

L-3 (l3harris.com) is a Department of Defense contractor in aerospace systems and national security solutions. The Melbourne site specializes in SATCOM, Electronic Warfare Systems, Tactical Radios, Threat Simulators and Obscuration Systems.

“We had our stockroom offsite and the transportation and wait time required to go and get material and bring it back,” says L-3’s Steve Black. “We were only able to support about two runs a day.” Like most organizations dealing in warehoused inventory, L-3 needed much greater accessibility. “We wanted to bring our fast moving inventory next to our manufacturing site and we were okay with building a building to do that, but we had only a very small footprint to work with.”

So Steve contacted Outsource Equipment Company (osequip.com)and talked to salesperson Mark Smith. “Mark is really responsive. He came and met with me, and he brought options,” Steve explains.

“We had a really good exchange. I told him our goal was to reduce square footage in terms of floor space and that I wanted to be able to gain back as much as I could.”

Ultimately, Mark presented a solution that Steve says was “the perfect match.” Mark found a single, brand-new Modula vertical lift module (VLM) that would meet all the requirements

“We settled on the Modula Lift ML50D because it has 1,800 square feet of storage capacity,” says Steve. “Based on the amount of shelving we had per shelf, that equaled 10 rows of shelves – which was a pretty big deal, as it was the exact amount of space we needed.”

Specific Benefits:

The benefits of the VLM automated storage/retrieval system weren’t limited to space savings, though. “It sped up our kit-pull process by about 60%,” Steve notes. “From that standpoint, it allowed us to reduce staffing, because we don’t have to have as many people running the stockroom to make the output requirement.”

“And the VLM provides a quicker release for us,” adds L-3’s Mary Henn. “We simply tell it to bring down the tray where an item is rather than having to search up and down shelves. There’s a much quicker turnaround, so we are able to satisfy our internal customers when they need a part quickly.”

Productivity can be increased by approximately 2.5 times by using a Modula VLM. In addition to the reduced amount of time spent searching, other key reasons for this are:

Less time spent walking the aisles

Less time spent replenishing

Less time spent on paperwork

Even stocking the VLM was a breeze compared to setting up a traditional warehouse. “The actual stocking is easier because the computer tells you where to put things. When you have shelves in a stockroom, you basically have to do an alphanumeric ordering of the parts,” Steve points out. “Now we don’t have to do it that way. That’s a huge time savings as far as building a stock room from the ground up,” he says. “It reduces the overall complexity.”