IPF Intern making an impact

Ben Richardson, a senior who graduated this spring with a degree in supply chain management, recently teamed up with IPF’s Materials and Logistics staff to create the ABC Analysis project, which has been in place for several months now.

 “We have a warehouse full of around 6,400 parts and essentially we wanted to categorize those parts based on importance and price and how often they are ordered,” Richardson said. “We categorized them by A, B, and C parts. The A parts are more important than the C parts, so we need to have more focus on them.”

Jeff Groll, Manager of Material and Logistics, mentioned before implementing the ABC Analysis project, they were counting everything equally, bin to bin. A pile of C parts could have a $100 in variance but they would spend eight hours counting it. Now they can focus their time on parts that are most important. They count A parts four times more a month, B parts two times more a month and C parts one time a month, which helps cut down on time and cost.

“There’s savings in the overall variance in the year,” Groll said. “It’s significantly lower now than we were at this time last year. At the end of the fiscal year, the variance that we do have, we disperse that through all the maintenance shops at IPF so really it will save their budget by not passing that variance on to them. It’s less of a burden.”

Alongside the ABC Analysis, Richardson also created a dashboard to manage orders through Excel. This saves time by helping future student interns locate and sort orders.

“This was the probably the best internship we’ve had in this department,” Groll said of Richardson’s work.

Richardson has a full- time job lined this fall with Walgreens in Chicago.

“This was a really cool experience,” he said. “To be able to do a project and internship rather than going to class… I really felt like I was doing something that would help my future. It helped me get better with Excel as well as learning about supply chain management and I’m thankful for the opportunity.”