It was Montgomery, Alabama, in the early 1960s, and home builder Jim Bishop was struggling to find quality cabinets for his business. 

To solve the problem, Bishop began building his own cabinets and what started as a “mom-and-pop operation”  in 1964 is today a $30 million growing enterprise.

And, while many things have changed in the last 60 years, a few things have stayed the same. Two Bishop family members, sons Jim Jr. and Price, are part of a group of company owners while other family members have additional roles in this third-generation family business. 

It is a fiscally sound, faith-based company, and, perhaps most importantly,  when they see a problem, they focus on a solution.

For instance, tracking the voluminous number of options offered, and the combinations of styles a customer can choose so that cabinets are assembled efficiently.  

“Up to the early nineties,” said Jeff Gulledge, president and co-owner, “we only offered a handful of stain options and our primary species was red oak.” 

“Now,” he added, “we have six wood species, 14 paints standard and 16 finishes standard, and we have a custom color program that will match anything sent to us, including the color of my shirt.”

Improving efficiencies 
The company, officially incorporated as Jim Bishop Cabinets doing business as Bishop Cabinets, was traditionally a supplier to the multifamily market, but in the early 1990s focused on the residential market and began offering higher end, more diverse options.

The company offers two collections  that within each can feature a combination of wood species, door styles and finish. The Design Elements Collection features custom-tailored doors and has 5- to 7-week lead times. The Essentials Collection offers pre-designed door styles in many  combinations and has a 3-week lead time.

While customers and their dealers were appreciative of these options, it also meant that Bishop Cabinets began to bulge at the factory seams, facing production bottlenecks, an aging workforce, and other frustrations of a growing cabinetry company.
New equipment was added; more machines are on the way. 

Fostering efficiency was a critical component of the growth plan, and to achieve this goal Bishop Cabinets is replacing software built in-house with sophisticated Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software to better manage inventory, track projects and production operations. It added wireless Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology that uses radio waves and embedded computer chips to identify and track cabinet components as they make their way through machining operations and continue to assembly and shipping.

Keeping track
The company is currently transitioning to a new ERP system to run the whole business, said Gulledge. “All the software we currently use was written in-house by two or three guys,” he said. “We’re just seeing that as being unsustainable over the next 10 years. They’re irreplaceable, and so we had to find a third-party software to facilitate future growth.” 

The ERP Software from 2020 Insight is “going to change the way that we do business,” Gulledge said. “Our customers won’t necessarily see that other than in exceptional quality, but internally it’s going to change a lot of the ways that we do business and make us more efficient.”

The company builds 300 to 350 cabinets a day, getting them through production and shipped efficiently is being made easier with the ERP even as it rolls out new features, said Justin Martin, director of operations. 
Previously, panels would be processed on a Homag Centateq processing center or machined on the Biesse Rover A, and then parts would sit and wait. 

Stacks and stacks and rows and rows of cart-filled work in progress (WIP) would sit waiting for additional parts to be ready. Typically, the bottleneck was the parts that needed to be finished. 

On one typical Thursday — the company works a Monday to Thursday schedule — 7,000 cut parts, 3,150 doors and drawer fronts, 2,100 shelves and more then 600 drawer boxes were in WIP. With ERP “directing traffic,” that number can be reduced significantly, in some cases cut in half. 

“All those cut panels that are just going to sit in carts for 2 to 3 days, taking up space and potentially getting damaged while waiting for the finished parts to flow the rest of the path to assembly,” said Martin. “With the ERP system, we know what parts will be needed for assembly. So, if we assemble on Thursday, we can cut and machine the parts on Wednesday and reduce our WIP.”

While managing inventory is important, equally as important is information gathering, disseminating, and actually using information, said Martin. 

“The real benefit is getting accurate information to the shop floor team members, the ones that actually build the cabinets,” he said. “With all of those options we have, getting information to them to build it correctly is critical.”
This might include a last-minute style change or drawing change. The new system can help make changes quicker and with higher accuracy than today’s processes. “If the customer wants to reduce the depth of a cabinet by 3/16,” said Gulledge,  “we would have to go in and reduce every single part by 3/16. In this new system, we’ll go in and just change the size and it parametrically changes every component in the drawing.”

Most components are finished on a hanging line using hand sprayers, which created a  bottleneck. Team members looked at the data and determined that a small flat-line finishing unit would free space on the hang line that could be used for additional hand-sprayed components. 

“We acquired a Makor flat line system to run panels, fillers, and things like that, running two or three colors, and it expanded our capacity on the hanging line significantly,”  said Martin, “And that choice was based on the data of parts going through each department.”

Following the part
Knowing where a part is in the process and how a job order is progressing was also important for manufacturing and sales personnel. Tracking the parts is aided by an RFID system. Currently, RFID units are stationed at various machining areas such as the finishing spray booth and QuickWood sanding system. 

“We’d already started going down that road two years ago with RFID tags that we put in our doors that give us checkpoints in the plant so we can see where these parts are,” said Gulledge. 

Bar code labels are inserted in hinge holes. Even if a part is painted, an RFID scanner reads through paint. 

Eventually these units will be augmented by RFID wands used by line workers. “So, we will get more data and better data on the parts,” said Martin.

Utilizing data from the ERP and RFID technologies, accurate and real-time data is available. For instance,  if the customer is wondering if their job is in production or if a certain door style or color is available, the answer is at their fingertips. “Instead of a customer service member searching for the answer,” said Martin. “They could pull up the information and say, ‘Your door is in production,’ or ‘It’s getting sprayed right now. That should ship tomorrow.’”