Who Are They?
Lee Roy Jordan Lumber Company sells building materials to commercial and residential contractors. They lead the industry as one of the largest suppliers of Redwood and other specialty woods in multiples states across the nation. In 1977, a redwood company was purchased and renamed by Lee Roy Jordan. He is a former Dallas Cowboy football player who is a member of three halls of fame and inducted into the Dallas Cowboy Ring of Honor in 1990.
Ask
The issue that Lee Roy Lumber was having was something Flowtrac is used to solving. The problem results often from becoming more and more successful. In Jordan’s case, they were selling more and more specialty lumber thus their lumber yard was expanding. They were wasting countless hours searching their yards to determine whether they had the specific quantities of specialty lumbers that customers were asking for. Their quantities of lumber and how fast they were moving was vastly too large to manage using neither pen and paper nor electronic spreadsheets. They were constantly asking themselves: Do they have such and such sizes of redwood? If so, where was it? So, associates were physically having to walk the facilities and put eyes of materials. It seemed almost like an unending game of hide and seek with lumber. In the words of one of Jordan’s employees, “It was a mess; we have a lot of different SKUs, around 20 or 30,000.”
Answer
The first thing we did to solve Lee Roy Jordan Lumber’s problem was learn more about their company. Flowtrac team members spent time with the lumber company and set up the system the way it would work best for them. The tricky part for Jordan Lumber was that they needed a an inventory software robust enough to not just keep count of a particular pallet’s SKU, but all the individual lumber SKUs inside of that pallet, including partially picked pallets. As part of the need was software that would manage the locations of lumber. In other words, you need to know where exactly the lumber is in the yard, so you can walk right to it. Flowtrac delivered this software. Our software out of the box allows you to track items within items. Flowtrac is tracking everything in the yard. The company can see what lumber is on each pallet, how many pallets they have, and the location of every pallet. This package is an example of an in-house system. It makes the data accessible from the company computers for quick searches while on the phone with customers and planning orders.
Outcomes
We’ll let the president of the company, David Jordan, speak to the outcomes of having Flowtrac and how it’s changed their operations:
Flowtrac has been instrumental in helping us manage our inventory. What makes them different from the competition is their level of service. And the product itself is superior to the other software companies that we’ve dealt with in the past. They understand our business the product itself works. Would I recommend Flowtrac? Absolutely.
David Jordan, President