Every machine shop has a tool crib, even if it's just a rolling cabinet next to the lathes. In a small job shop it's a few drawers of inserts and a rack of end mills. In a production plant it's a locked room, a vending machine or two, and someone whose job is to keep the right tools on hand without tying up a fortune in carbide.
The distributor who manages that crib owns the account. But managing it the old way, with a rep counting drawers on paper and emailing the results, burns through your margin fast.
Label every drawer and bin
The app prints barcode bin labels for every crib and bin. Each label carries your item: the exact insert designation and grade, the end mill's diameter, flute count and coating, the tap's size, pitch and style. When an operator pulls the last box of inserts, he scans the label on the empty drawer and the reorder is right. No one has to remember whether it was the steel grade or the stainless grade.
A crib attendant with a scanner gun can walk the room, scan everything that's low and upload the whole batch at once.
Counts with a suggested order
When you count the crib yourself, counts and receiving run on a phone and go to your system to post. After each count, the app shows a suggested order: the max, minus what's on hand, minus what's already on order, rounded up to the pack size. In cutting tools that last part matters. Inserts come in boxes of ten, taps in packs, and nobody wants to break a box of carbide inserts to send three.
Receiving works the same way, so the shop knows what arrived and you know it was checked in.
One page for the shop
The on-site program gives each customer a single page for everything you manage there:
- A plant dashboard: tap any crib, vending machine or RFID rack and see its bins from the front and the top.
- The floor plan to scale, with drag and drop and a CAD download, so you can show where a new vending unit goes next to the CNC cells.
- Counting bins, what's on hand and where, and every machine and bin with exact sizes.
- A showcase you can use when you pitch the same program to the next shop.
When the shop manager asks how much carbide is sitting in the crib, or where the coolant concentrate lives, you can answer from the page.
Protect yourself on special tooling
Cutting tool distributors stock a lot of things for one customer: a specials drill with a custom step, a form tool for one part number, a particular insert grade nobody else uses. Then the job ends, the part number goes obsolete, and you're left holding carbide nobody wants.
Dedicated custom inventory agreements fix that. The customer signs for items stocked just for them, gets notices at six months, then 90, 60 and 30 days, and anything left is invoiced at 12 months. It's clear, it's fair, and it keeps one shop's job from becoming your dead stock.
A crib you manage well is a crib a competitor has a hard time getting into. Every labeled drawer is a reorder that comes to you, every count that posts on its own is time your rep spends on application work instead of data entry, and every shop manager who can see his crib on one page has a reason to keep you there.
Ready to walk through it with your own shops? Book a demo.