Oak Ridge National Laboratory Eliminates Cylinder Discrepancies With Distributor...

This article was published in the March/April 2002, Volume 46, Number 2 issue of Gases & Welding Distributor.

Welding supply distributors can have large customers with hundreds, even thousands of cylinders in use. Although high volume means great revenue, tracking the location and movement of all those cylinders can create customer-related issues. With large numbers of cylinders in play, it is not uncommon for a customer and distributor to disagree on how many the customer has onsite. Discrepancies cause friction between the distributor and the customer - sometimes to the point of severing the relationship. Cylinder discrepanies, however, can be eliminated.

Nestled in the rolling hills of Tennessee just outside Knoxville, Oak Ridge National Laboratories (ORNL) is a large facility with over 3,000 employees and using nearly 8,000 cylinders. It's known worldwide for developing products ranging from plastics strong enough for use as hammers, to abrasion-resistant surfaces used in hip replacements. Their focus on quality, innovation, and efficiency extends to the materials management department charged with tracking the location and contents of thousands of compressed gas cylinders.

Randy Hinton, accelerated vendor inventory delivery coordinator: "Like many organizations deploying a large number of cylinder, we used to dread setting up meetings with our distributor, Air Liquide in Oak Ridge, TN. The number of cylinders we thought we had never seemed to agree with their count. Neither of us liked paying for lost cylinders. The big question was always, 'Who is at fault?'"

Funding by taxpayer dollars intensifies the budgetary concerns. The time consumed locating cylinders and discussing discrepancies plagued the partnership.

"There were a lot of discrepancies before ORNL's current system was put into place because of the large number and mixtures that ORNL was ordering. It was difficult to reconcile which cylinder held which type of gas," agreed Wayne Bowling, Air Liquide's manager for ORNL.

ORNL had installed an expensive home grown cylinder tracking system using programs developed and maintained by its internal programers. In practice however, the system proved clumsy and inefficient. Operators found it difficult to extract and interpret the data it generated.

ORNL finally consulted with DataWeld and selected a radio frequency handheld computer system that updated their database in real-time.

A Simple Procedure

The process of eliminating discrepancies begins when the vendor arrives at the ORNL dock to drop off filled cylinders. The driver scans the barcode on each cylinder with a handheld computer to indicate that the cylinders have been shipped to ORNL. The dock worker at ORNL also scans each cylinder confirming arrival using a radio frequency handheld computer. The process is repeated for cylinders returned to Air Liquide.

Once all cylinders have been scanned, ORNL prints out a report that shows the bar code number for every cylinder received and returned. Ther eis a space on the report for two signatures - one for the distributor and one for ORNL verifying the agreement.

When the driver returns to his office, he downloads his handheld computer to his main computer to update his cylinder records. He then emails ORNL a list of all the cylinders that have been updated to his computer. When ORNL receives the email, it compares the count received form the distributor to that captured by ORNL employees when the cylinders were unloaded. Any differences can be identified and resolved right at the start.

Randy Hinton explained that most problems encountered now are minor ones like incorrect dates. "We received a few cylinders in early January that had the wrong year. Within five minutes the dates were corrected and we were in agreement."

The system works so smoothly that those unpleasant meetings to resolve cylinder discrepancies have been totally eliminated. Hinton explalins: "We no longer question the distributor. We now know abosolutely that we did or did not receive a cylinder. If we can't find one when it is time to return it we know it is our responsibility to reimburse them."

"The fact that ORNL has their own tracking system that balances with ours allows us to be accurate each and every day," agrees Bowling.

Internal Monitoring

Every cylinder can also be traced to a department within the facility and to a purchase order number saving a great deal of accounting time allocating rental charges to different departments.

Sometimes one department borrows a cylinder from another and then returns the empty. "The system now allows us to identify those wandering cylinders when they reach the dock," says Hinton. "It automatically takes them off the records of the original department eliminating a lot of accounting problems."

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