For over 50 years, Alabama-based Linden Lumber has been specializing in producing and exporting Southern hardwood lumber across the globe. Their process of producing lumber is a complex “art form” that takes years of experience and knowledge, ensuring that lumber moves through their facility as smoothly as possible with the highest-yield. With over 250 employees involved in their daily operations, they saw room for improvement in inventory and shipping activities.
Customer Challenge
Linden Lumber’s shipping and inventory operations used a traditional, non-rugged laptop that lacked the functionality they needed to elevate productivity and efficiency. This translated to many staff members using the traditional pen and paper method and later transferring that information to the corporate database. This process was time consuming and created data errors throughout the mill.
Linden Lumber proceeded to seek out a mobile computing solution that would maximize productivity and withstand the harsh conditions in the mill.
MobileDemand Solution
When Linden Lumber noticed their non-rugged laptops were slowing down overall efficiencies within mill, they looked to MobileDemand for a rugged solution. The Surface Pro and rugged xCase was the ideal computing system for Linden Lumber to better manage their operations and meet market and client demands.
The Microsoft Surface Pro plus MobileDemand’s premium case provides a light-weight solution workers easily adopted while supporting their existing ERP software, production/shipping software and inventory software cohesively. Additionally, the port covers allow for users to take the Surface throughout the entire mill without dust and debris damaging the unit.
Results
As a result of deploying Surface Pro with a rugged xCase, Linden Lumber has seen an increase in overall productivity and a decrease in shipping and inventory errors. Not only did this improve Linden’s bottom line, but being able to better process and distribute accurate and on-time orders has had a positive impact on customer satisfaction.