Futon Frames by Harley - Distribution Factor
Jim Woll is company GM and is a driving force in new product development
Jim Woll, the company's General Manager, came to Futons by Harlee five years ago. He joined Steve and me on the tour. Jim came to Harlee through the waterbed industry. "I've known Steve and his family for years," said Woll. "When I was with American National Watermattress, we did a large amount of business with Harlee. The trust factor was definitely at work in that relationship as it is now in my role as General Manager," he said. Trained as an engineer Woll is the product development guru for the company. Rounding out the Harlee team is controller Jim Seltzer and inside sales associate Jim Murphy.
Company Controller Jim Seltzer
At the very end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, the first Indiana Jones movie, there is a scene which has always stuck in my head. Indy has just struck out with the government bureaucrats who refuse to let him pursue a further study the Ark. As he kisses the girl on the steps of a non-descript government building the shot shifts to a close-up of someone nailing down the cover of a huge wooden box with the Ark inside it. The man then begins to push a cart with the large box on it through a warehouse. The camera then pans back to show an enormous warehouse filled with thousands of similar looking wooden boxes all filled with futon frames. Well that's how I could best describe what I saw, and the feeling I got when I walked into the Harlee warehouse.
"Each row here is one container or one truckload," said Leichter. "And right now, with this entire 51,000 square feet full of product, we are talking three to four months of futon frame inventory on hand. We keep that level of goods available at all times," said Woll. "You can never tell what is going to happen overseas," added Leichter. "We've made a commitment to ourselves and our customers to ship orders in twenty-four hours and we mean to keep it," he said. At first I thought he was kidding but I then realized he was serious. Harlee regularly ships futon frame orders in twenty-four hours. Leichter also shared that it is not uncommon for a truck to arrive at Harlee's dock before a customer has even placed an order. "We are able to have the futon frame order on the road in only a few hours," he said.
The Harlee warehouse is a clean modern facility boasting over 50,000 sq. ft. of floor space
Everything in the warehouse was stacked about twenty to thirty high with no pallets anywhere. I began to ask myself how they moved this mass of inventory without pallets, when around the corner came a fork lift truck. "These trucks are fitted with carton clamps," said Woll, who added, "We needed to put these in about a year and a half ago so we could eliminate the wasted space that pallets use. The clamps allow us to go thirty high and still be able to move futons to the staging area easily." The shipping and receiving area is enclosed inside the building and had four docks for unloading containers with inventory and loading trailers for shipping deliveries.
Another interesting feature about this area of California is the fact that it is a major trucking hub. A fact that serves Harlee well. "We get some of the best shipping rates available because of the huge number of truckers here in the Corona/Ontario area," said Leichter. "And because we have the real estate we can stage our deliveries right here at the dock. This allows us to load quickly and get our trucks on the road," said Woll. The company's ability to quickly move futon frames from inventory to the staging area also affords them a reputation as the people to call when there is some space left on a trailer traveling to the city or region of a Harlee customer. "With this system in place truckers see us as a true distributor. They can call us in the morning with an unfilled twenty foot space on a truck going to an East Coast city, and we can have a shipment ready to go that afternoon," said Leichter. By early next year Harlee will be putting in a full bar coding system on all futon frames as well.