IFC’s experience in delivering hardware and building supplies

Building supply shipments that arrive late or damaged can cause significant delays on construction sites, causing critical completion deadlines to be thrown off. IFC know how important it is to deliver supplies on time. The full-service and consultative approach promotes efficiency throughout the entire supply chain process to eliminate delays and excessive holding times.

In addition, IFC can use an industry-specific process that matches the Just-In-Time production system used by many current automotive manufacturing facilities to streamline the supply chain process.

IFC’s success in the hardware and building supplies industry can be demonstrated through client case studies, including for national brands Mitre 10 and Total Tools.

For Mitre 10, IFC developed a Forward Orders (FO) Consolidation Program in which goods arrive at a centralised Container Freight Station (CFS) as consolidated purchase orders (PO) from individual vendors. They are then broken down, picked, palletised, and labelled into subset POs at the store level with the store name and destination address. As a result, this saw reduced interstate distribution and logistics costs and improved stock lead times.

Similarly, in collaboration with Total Tools, IFC developed an innovative new Direct-to-Store model that moved processing and consolidation to an offshore location in Shanghai. From this location, store-ready palletised orders were directly shipped to each Australian state for immediate transportation to the store. The transition to this solution resulted in establishing a regular flow of stock to stores and a 25% reduction in logistic costs.

Learn more about how IFC can assist the hardware and building supplies industry. Contact the team to discuss how IFC can help create a tailored solution to assist your business with supply chain logistics management.