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The complete product line is highly diversified. Alro often stocks items that no one else will, Glick says, citing the widest variety of cold-finished Grade 1018 flats of any service center in the United States, for instance. Alro continually adds products based on customer demand. "We ask our customers, 'What do you want us to stock?' A lot of customers want items other than what they're already purchasing from us," Glick says. "Our philosophy is, you come to Alro to get everything. Fast delivery, right the first time. We take care of big customers and little customers with the same attitude. They are all important. Little customers grow into big customers," he adds. Because of the large volume of orders Alro processes each day, occasional mistakes are unavoidable. "When we do make a mistake, our first emphasis is to take care of the customer, then figure out what happened and fix it."
Service capabilities, customer relations With its fleet of 150 trucks and trailers, Alro estimates its delivery capacity at 8.5 million pounds a day. Eighty to 90 percent of the orders Alro ships today were taken yesterday. To fill orders so rapidly, Alro uses a 240,000-square-foot warehouse in Potterville, Mich., as a hub to serve all its locations in Michigan, Indiana and Ohio, as well as more far-flung branches. Trucks arrive all day and night to pick up material at Potterville's 19 loading docks. "We might get a mill shipment that will go to several locations. We'll unload that truck and put it straight onto other trucks," he explains. "Over half the material received in Potterville is just cross-docked to go to our other locations." Alro has spoiled its customers with next-day delivery and wants to keep them spoiled, Glick says. "If we can't do it, we tell them we can't. We do what we say we're going to do. The word of one Alro employee should be the word of all of them," he remarks. "Nobody can compete service-wise with us. Unless they have products we don't have, there's no way they can out-service us." The company especially prides itself on being there in a pinch. In one instance, an alert Alro salesperson provided GM's Lansing assembly plant with a special alloy bar that enabled the carmaker to quickly replace a broken shaft in a machine and return the plant to production. What could have taken days was fixed in hours. "The plant manager told us that when his plant is down, it costs $50,000 an hour," Glick says. "We kept GM from having to send people home and kept their production on line." In addition to winning GM's Supplier of the Year award in 1992, 1993 and 1994, Alro received notice Oct. 24 that it had won the Q1 Quality Award from Ford Motor Co. this year. Alro sends out satisfaction surveys to 300 or 400 different customers every week. If any are returned with very negative comments, guess who handles it? "I get right on the phone, and they're shocked when I call. I ask, 'What did we do wrong and how can we correct it?' In many cases, we take problems and turn them into opportunities," Glick says. Inventories, data systems Deep inventories and the use of advanced data management technologies help keep Alro competitive. Alro's inventories, with 3.5 months of material on hand, are the highest in the company's history--but so are its sales. page 3 |
Alro's
leadership, from left, includes Carl Glick, vice president and secretary;
David Schmidt, director of purchasing; Barry Glick, vice chairman
and president, Alro Metals; Mark Alyea, president and chief operating
officer; Bob Glick, vice president; Randy Glick, vice president,
assistant secretary and treasurer; and Chairman and CEO Al Glick.