Protective outerwear maker Nasco enhances customer service with Eton UPS
06 Jul '05
4 min read
“Even though modular provided us with some savings, we found Eton to be the best way to achieve the efficiency and capacity we needed to become a world-class manufacturing operation”, stated Todd Smith, President & CEO of NASCO. “Because ours are not cookie-cutter products, we believe that keeping manufacturing here in the USA allows us to better serve our customers.”
Highlighting its focus on customer service, approximately 60% of NASCO's production is made to order, as specified by their distributor network. Given this level of customization, it is common to find more than 75 different designs in process at any given time. “Even though we are a manufacturer, we see ourselves rather as a service business”, added Smith. “Instead of limiting options to only reduce costs, our strategy is to build competitive advantage in this niche by embracing customization. We don't have a minimum size order. You will find everything from lots of one to 20,000 piece orders in our plant. Eton allows us to process small orders just as efficiently as bigger ones.”
Smith acknowledges that many small companies are reluctant to make large investments in enabling technologies like Eton Systems. “First, our investment decisions were supported by our market leadership and our confidence in our ability to sell our products. After that, ROI was everything to us. When we discovered that more than 20% of our operators' time was spent in non-productive activities like moving products around, we realized that we could be much more competitive by turning that into needle time. Since we implemented the system we have experienced reduction in direct labor cost and received a payback several months earlier than expected. After using Eton over several years, we are very pleased with the efficiency and throughput gains that we have achieved. It works as advertised.”
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