Connect with a Tooling Specialist Today | Call (800) 486-4243
Connect with a Tooling Specialist Today | Call (800) 486-4243
The customer, a job shop outside Lloyd Gage’s usual territory, ran vendor-managed inventory through a tool-vending unit on the floor — every tool had to be received, repackaged, and loaded into the machine, and its capacity was a hard ceiling on what could ever be stocked there.
Everything the vending unit couldn’t hold ended up in five massive cabinets on the side — including a serious investment in ¾” and 1″ solid carbide round tooling, the expensive end of the catalog.
Almost none of it got used. Operators didn’t want to dig through drawers looking for a tool that might or might not be there, so the fastest path was always to order new. Programmers had no visibility into what was already on the shelf either — they wrote the program and ordered the tooling as if the cabinets were empty. Every month, the shop spent more on carbide it may well have already owned.
Lloyd Gage’s team spent three full days on-site physically cataloging every tool in the shop — the vending unit and all five cabinets. That was the easy part.
The harder part came next: weeks of scrubbing that raw catalog into plain-language, custom descriptions the shop’s own team could actually search — not a wall of manufacturer part numbers nobody had memorized, but names and terms operators would type without thinking twice. Then it went live: one searchable digital tool crib, giving operators and programmers the same accurate picture of everything on hand for the first time.
A flat tool list wasn’t going to be enough. As a job shop, this customer doesn’t run the same part twice in a row — the same tool can perform completely differently from one material to the next. So Lloyd Gage customized the workflow: before picking a tool, the user picks the material they’re cutting first. Every selection builds a running record of which tools actually perform well in which materials, job after job.
“We had $300,000 sitting in cabinets — and we didn’t even know it.”
UNUSED TOOLING FOUND
ON-SITE CATALOG BUILD
CABINETS MADE SEARCHABLE
A flat tool list wasn’t going to be enough. As a job shop, this customer doesn’t run the same part twice in a row — the same tool can perform completely differently from one material to the next. So Lloyd Gage customized the workflow: before picking a tool, the user picks the material they’re cutting first. Every selection builds a running record of which tools actually perform well in which materials, job after job.
“We had $300,000 sitting in cabinets — and we didn’t even know it.”
“We had $300,000 sitting in cabinets and didn’t even know it. Lloyd Gage didn’t just find it — they built us a system so it never happens again.”
