Tips & News - Winter 2017

OVER THE YEARS, YOU HAVE MADE CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENTS TO OUR DISTRIBUTION CENTER, HOW DO THOSE BENEFIT OUR CUSTOMERS? The foundation of our approach is if we can be safer, have a higher quality, and be more productive that will lower the costs of warehousing and shipping material to our customers while also saving our customers time trying to correct our issues. Some of our recent improvements include: Customized our Warehouse Management System (WMS) for greater efficiency and quality thereby supplying our customers quicker with fewer errors to chase down. Implemented a Transportation Management Software (TMS) to increase our efficiency selecting carriers and increase responsiveness to customer needs. Implemented a “Push System” of picking and process automation to respond to customer priorities and demands in a more timely and effective manner with a high level of quality Developed a menu of customer selections of documents, labels, and electronic transactions that match the wide variety of customer needs 1 2 3 4

THE DISTRIBUTION CENTER HAS ACHIEVED AND MAINTAINED HIGH LEVELS ON ON-TIME-PERFORMANCE OVER THE LAST 10 YEARS. HOW WILL YOU LOOK TO IMPROVE SERVICE TO OUR CUSTOMERS? First of all, safety is always our first priority. Our employees must go home in the same health as when they arrived. Next is accuracy. It is not very useful to our customer if the material shipped quickly but it was the wrong material. Our ultimate accuracy goal and target is a 6 Sigma level of accuracy: 3.4 errors per million or 99.99966% accurate. That is a very lofty goal and hard to achieve but that is what we are striving towards. Next, but not least, is our on-time performance. We have an excellent on-time performance which is driven by a partnership between our manufacturing capabilities and planning and the distribution center. We routinely breakdown and investigate the small number of on- time failures to expose our opportunities for improvement and build a roadmap to correct. 5M STORMSTATS 2017HPS Hurr icane I rma, Hurr icane Harvey, Hurr icane Mar ia, Cal i fornia Wi ldf i res Visit videos.hubbellpowersystems.com/category/videos/ about-hps to take a virtual tour of our distribution center!

DO YOU SEE OUR INDUSTRY STARTING TO MOVE OR EVOLVE FASTER IN TERMS OF ADAPTING NEW SYSTEMS AND SOFTWARE? The electrical utility industry is commonly conservative when approaching new technology, especially in support services like warehousing and material movement. The general warehousing industry is moving forward with increasing availability and decreasing expense of automation. HPS must continue its drive for innovation or risk being outmoded, outdated, and out of touch. The need for quicker and more effective material movement is only going to increase, so we must continue to look for, and incorporate best practices. For instance, we may learn a more cost effective way to handle large volume of piece picking from a publishing company or a streamlined method to stretch wrap and label pallets from a toothpaste manufacturer. Bottom line: we need to continue to investigate our opportunities to streamline processes and introduce automation where it makes sense.

pounds shipped

1000 l ineman care packages 400+ trucks

HUBBELL POWER SYSTEMS | 17