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Fraschetti, a leading Italian hardware and household item retailer, purchases from more than 500 suppliers and restocks approximately 2,500 sales points throughout Italy, often with exclusive products purchased in Europe or the Far East and distributed under its own logo. Due to the size of the sector and the numerous product categories within, the distributor has a prominent role in the exclusive distribution of big name brands.
“To work efficiently with traditional shops you have to be service orientated,” Giorgio Fraschetti, vice president of sales, said. “We have a network of 44 single-brand representatives connecting with the company at least once a day. Our program involves deliveries at least twice a week over the whole area and once a week in the more inaccessible areas. In some ‘privileged’ areas like Rome and Naples and the entire Latium coast, deliveries arrive every day. An order received by noon today is filled by tomorrow.”
The widespread nature of the deliveries means Fraschetti manages an enormous number of orders and invoices each day. Working closely with Intermec partner Incas, Fraschetti now uses Intermec’s 2455 vehicle mount computers in place of traditional paper-based means of shipping and receiving to ensure the right products and correct amount are delivered to the appropriate retail locations. The logistics involved in managing this many orders can be daunting. Consider a large number of deliveries that each include an extremely complex assortment of goods of different amounts, e.g. 10 pulleys, nine tubes, 11 boxes of nails, six bags of earth, four pipes, etc. The inventory management and distribution process could be staggering. The use of Intermec’s 2455 vehicle mount computers has enabled the Italian retailer to easily move nearly 12,000 items per day without error.
After an item is formatted, it is assigned a bar code label. The bar code label is identified by the Intermec 2455 vehicle mount computer. The goods are then handled as indicated by the computer. The Intermec 2455 shows where to position goods in accordance with a specially designed logic as well as the items’ destination. After the positioning of the goods, all handling, movement and checking is done using the Intermec 2455.
Since using Intermec, the improvement in warehouse operations has been dramatic. The entire warehouse area is now mapped allowing Fraschetti to track all of its items at all times. A considerable increase in the number of operations performed and a steep fall in the number of errors occurred has contributed to the organization’s increased profitability. In the future, Fraschetti plans to implement an automation system for its other very important operations, such as the optimization of loads and the automatic weighing of larger packages.
The ownership of the company has always remained in the family and after periods of strong growth and others of consolidation; it is now in its fourth generation. The company today operates across the center and south of Italy providing a very high level of service and annual sales totaling around 35 million Euros.
In the last few years, the sector has moved on with the advent of the new DIY chains of shops, but the traditional sales point, the old-fashioned hardware store, still accounts for the largest percentage of business.
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