How Hess and K&B Industries Transformed Their Inventory Management with Innovapptive and Cognex
The energy company Hess partners with K&B Industries in Houma, Louisiana to support offshore operations, including material management and warehousing. Since Hess and K&B began using Innovapptive’s Connected Workforce Platform™ and Cognex mobile terminals to automate their inventory and warehouse management processes, they haven’t looked back.
Warehouse materials need to ship out to Hess on time in order to avoid costly delays. But K&B’s previous system was tedious and time-consuming: Items were received and checked against packing lists, written up, then logged manually into the computer system before being extracted onto a ‘movement sheet’ for inventory technicians. It could take an entire day to unload just a few pallets. Now, with Innovapptive’s Connected Workforce Platform running on Cognex MX series mobile terminals, this process has been reduced to mere minutes. Hess has achieved 10% reduction in inventory carrying costs and is aiming to achieve 99.5% inventory accuracy in the near future.
What’s made these remarkable results possible? The Cognex Mobile Barcode Software Development Kit (SDK) allows Innovapptive to integrate Cognex barcode scan data into its app fields to do things like inventory control and warehouse management. The Connected Workforce Platform system offers cycle counting and goods receipt features to itemize and organize products efficiently, so things don’t get lost. Thanks to Cognex’s blazing-fast barcode reading, K&B has been able to increase efficiency and throughput, completing within minutes tasks which formerly took hours. Cognex functionality also provides better traceability so that product doesn’t get lost. This is improving processes for the future. “The handhelds with barcode reading…It’s tremendous. Every day, we see a new application that could possibly be implemented,” said Laura Louviere, Customer Inventory Manager for K&B Industries. Watch the video to see the whole story:
Learn more about Cognex Mobile Barcode SDK and how it allows your company to integrate the functionality of Cognex barcode readers.
