Oral-B Reduces Display Components 74 Percent

Oral-B Laboratories has found a way to reduce the number of its inventoried display components from 160 to a mere 11.The new Oral-B Common Component Merchandising System enables the toothbrush maker to produce a variety of displays based on a few simple stock items.Previously, the Belmont, Calif.-based company would warehouse as many as 20 different displays, produced in small quantities for specific orders. Between 1995 and 1996 the company had 160 different display and packing parts on warehouse shelves. And yet, all the parts didn't always yield what was needed. "If a six-dozen display was too big, we didn't have another option," says Tim Squires, manager of merchandising and fixture systems at Oral-B.That lack of flexibility led the company to search for a way to respond more easily and cost-effectively to the need for account-specific displays. Working with engineers and designers at Henschel-Steinau Inc., Englewood, N.J., they found what they were looking for.Mixed and matched, the new components make it possible for Oral-B to assemble unique displays for specific accounts quickly and inexpensively, while saving labor, warehouse space and production costs. The system "provides our salespeople with a lot more versatility as they try to meet our customers' needs," Squires says. And it's cheaper. "The new common component merchandising system costs less than what we were doing previously," says Squires, who estimates a 12-percent reduction in cost."The most important thing for us is that we reduced the number of components we needed to build the various displays by nearly 75 percent. That's an enormous savings in inventory and manpower," he says. Producing fewer components in larger quantities also conserves enough of the budget to allow the use of more costly processes such as preprint flexography and five-color lithography.Squires says the common component system displays always appear in good shape. "Now, as a floorstand sells down, it can be adapted and put into a configuration that makes it look new and full," he says. The trays can be continually shifted or reduced in number and the product consolidated down to a two-dozen unit shelf extender.The components are assembled to order at the Oral-B production facility in Iowa City, Iowa. The company began using displays built from the new system in supermarkets, drugstores and mass merchants in 1996. "We even had Wal-Mart accept [a display] for the first time, thanks to the new system," says Squires.The heart of the system is an injection-molded tray. Each tray holds two dozen toothbrushes and can be snapped together to build different displays. The new brush tray features molded pockets "pitched in such a way that the brush is clamped in," explains Squires. The tray holds all of the different size brushes securely -- a big accomplishment considering the company recently changed over from uniformly boxed product to blister packs. The trays lock into a corrugated back panel that fits into a corrugated base.Having placed an initial order for 60,000 displays, Squires anticipates more than 150,000 systems will be in use by the end of 1997. The system is expected to remain viable for at least the next three years. All of the displays will be provided free of charge to retailers.

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