There is — we have a customer event each spring where we bring in thousands of customers and meet — they meet with suppliers, engage with different tools of the business. And the — we are winning business because of the capabilities. When I said in a customer discussion last summer and our national account person was speaking to the purchasing team from a bunch of locations within a conglomerate and they were explaining how the — how our RFID program worked. And that’s essentially a compound system with an embedded RFID chip. So in that bin is empty, instead of somebody having to walk around and check things and find stuff and see what needs to be replenished, that bin is placed on the top shelf. The top shelf has a simple RFID reader. It sees bin 14 is empty, oh, okay, I’m hungry, I need to be fed.
And that’s how replenishment works. And her response when she learned about it, she looked at a person across the room and said, “You remember the issue” and she talked about 4 different manufacturing plants where they struggled. She said, “This thing is ample [ph]”, asked a few clarifying questions. And she look to the person said, this is unbelievable. This would solve all of our problems. And that’s a light bulb that pops off a lot when people realize what this is. I was visiting an employee down in Illinois 2 weeks ago, employees celebrating 40 years, I drove down to spend the day with them and thank them for 40 years of service. And he said, “Hey, you want to go visit a customer with me” and I’m like “I’d love to”. And he showed me something in his wallet, he pulled out a little as the size of a credit card and I said, “What’s that?” and he said, “That’s my RFID chip”.
And he said the customer you’re going to, I’m going to show you how we’re using it in ways above and beyond just the konbond [ph] system. They’re using it for pallet replenishment. So they have a little envelope on the pallet rack and they have little card in there. And it’s a little plastic card with RFID chip, they grab that and they throw it in the top bin on the konbond [ph] system and it tells our branch, we need another pallet of this product. Not only is that incredibly efficient for us. The customer loves it. The customer showed it to me. He says, our folks love this because they don’t need to write stuff down and then call up Fastenal to bring another one over or wait for you guys when you come more tomorrow to check it and realize you need to bring another one over.
We just tell you but it’s done in a matter of seconds. That’s something a supply chain partner does and we’re great at plan spend. And that is winning us business because when other customers come and tour that facility when they’re in the RFQ process, they see stuff like that and that’s a separator, just like vending is a separator. Sorry, I went a little long there but I think it’s helpful to use some examples.
Holden Lewis: And I might add as well that I think that those 2 actually interconnect in the sense that to the extent that it helps to reduce our overall cost of operations than it does, that actually allows us more flexibility in bidding processes and I think makes us more competitive in the marketplace and contributes to our ability to win and gain market share as well. So it really plays — it plays really strongly in both our ability to leverage as well as our ability to grow.
