Raising the bar with best practices
By Industrial Distribution Staff -- Industrial Distribution, 5/1/1999
Anticipating customers' demands for more service, Robert Todd and his 60 employees constantly raise the bar themselves. Todd is president of CTF Supply, Ltd., a $16 million Canadian distributor of tools, fasteners and other construction supplies.CTF Supply was already well known to contractors, industrial buyers, hospitals and government officials from Vancouver to eastern Ontario when it gained further notoriety last year. It was named one of the country's 50 best-managed companies by Arthur Andersen and other members of a distinguished Canadian panel.
Todd says three major initiatives have defined his 22-year-old firm: starting a best practices program, which expanded a quality improvement initiative begun in 1990, creating a catalog and joining the Evergreen marketing group. Those efforts helped the company triple revenues in the past six years.
Four years ago, Toronto-based CTF Supply began reviewing and initiating best practices to become more efficient and reduce mistakes. Employees get paid $2 for each customer complaint form they fill out, and $100 when the problem, large or small, is solved.
"We went through the whole company line by line -- there were 43 items we wanted to fix -- and now we just keep going," says Todd. "Once you empower them, you sit back and watch. It really develops."
The company's best practices go much farther than reducing errors. Branch managers now write and present annual budgets and sales counter personnel devise plans to drive up revenue. CTF Supply's initiatives also meet the needs of contractors who have become more service conscious and demand JIT delivery.
For example, CTF provides 24-7 service with coded lock boxes at each branch, which allows customers to pick up tools, hardware and other products at all hours. Usually the lock boxes are booked by 2 p.m. for the next day.
John Davison, contracts and purchasing manager at Stacy Electric in Scarborough, Ontario,
credits CTF Supply's inventory management, such as a nuts and bolts box at his warehouse. The distributorship will take care of either a portable cabinet on job sites or a box at the customer's warehouse as a free service and also does prescribed maintenance for tools.
"It saves us a lot of time, and time is money," says Davison. "We've dealt with a lot of other hardware suppliers and CTF beats them all the time -- service is a big thing. If you've got trucks sitting around at $100 an hour because they don't have nuts and bolts, it makes the $2.50 saved on price seem like squat."
Other customers laud CTF's ability to quickly source unusual products and its overall construction industry knowledge, such as the sales desk staff's familiarity of product specifications. Jim Hibben, president of Dean Chandler Roofing in Toronto, says the company's emphasis on training produces results. For example, he says inquiries made to one CTF Supply employee often result in a return call from another employee who has more detailed product knowledge.
"I don't think they just got good guys out of the woodwork," says Hibben. "They make sure salespeople who sell to them give them the knowledge to pass on to us."
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