Kardex Remstar

July 2007 – September 2013

Kardex Remstar is a multinational, world wide company who specializes in Warehouse storage systems. This company was my jump from my EPoS work and experience into another industry in Warehouse management.
I started working for Kardex in July 2007 straight from Hospitality EPoS systems as a software engineer and continued working for them till September 2013. My main roles were to be a technical sales consultant, implement and install Kardex software, configure and customize the Kardex software into the Kardex storage machinery and interface most of the time into the customer’s own warehouse management sytems/ERP systems. The most common interfaces i had to do was for systems like SAP (we used IDOC middleware) or systems that could use a text/CSV file format.

An example video on how a Kardex Shuttle works:

An example video on how Assembly Kit Management works:

Kardex Remstar PowerPick Global Software:

When I started with Kardex UK (as they were called then), there was 2 engineers for software and 1 manager who delegated our jobs.  I mainly covered the south of England and Wales, plus all of Scotland, while my colleague who was based in the North of England covered that area.  When the work was busy for one of us the other and our manager used to take some of the work load to help that engineer.  We all covered the customer support during office hours for the whole of the UK. A couple of years later this setup all changed as Kardex UK was going through some hard times with recession and took on a new operations director who had come from Head office and made a shakeup within the office processes. The new Operations Director made a third of the office staff redundant including my manager and then Kardex moved to a smaller office as its all they needed to operate.  At the beginning it was a shock to the system for all of us, but as time went by it seemed to work streamlining  the company’s approach to how business was done.  There had seemed to be alot of “deadwood” in the company before and now everyone was working their up-most at full capacity to make the company day to day routine work.

My experience in the early days before this shakeup was a very depressing one as the recent sales made just before my career start working for kardex (what I was involved in at the start) seemed to have been miss-sold to customers and they were expecting more than they got.  I was the last man on site to finish installations and was also the one that heard moans from the customers.  This seemed to be due to sales knowledge and sometimes even software engineer’s skills and inexperience at that moment with the products they were selling.  I called myself “The Caretaker” for the first year as i was clearing up the miss-sold software installations and educating customers, sales persons and sometimes my own manager on what the software would actually do.

Things had to change for the better ….. and they did….. much better… for the company and customers.

After 3 years into my Kardex career, the management decided to take on a sales person just for software sales.  This was a good turning point for Kardex, the person they took on seemed to have a good grasp and understanding on what he was selling, and also I did train him on software.

With the on-boarding of the software sales person, it made both my colleague’s and my work easier as customers were getting the right solutions and seemed much happier with Kardex.  Also I liked the fact that if the software sales person did not know an answer he called us to get the right one….. not just say YES to everything the customer asked for, as this had seemed to be the problem before with miss-selling to customer’s expectations on what the software could actually do.

On the 4th year of my work career with Kardex they released to the UK a software called PowerPick Global which was to revolutionize what had been given in the past as a software solution.  It was very good software as I started to find as I used it and was built on a .NET platform so was compatible with new features of windows technology whenever Microsoft decided to release a new version of software in anything PowerPick Global had connections to.  This software also gave Kardex the ability to stay with the other competitive companies who offered more to the customers that Kardex’s previous software PP5000 could not.

If you want to know more about Kardex Remstar and who they are click on here

In the last few years working for Kardex they made many changes to how their company was structured to give the best services to their customers. For example Kardex UK joined up with all the other countries who were also Kardex companies, to make one united Kardex global company to work together as a team. They also bought the software company “Global Software Solutions” and re-branded it as “Kardex Software”. Kardex purchased “MegaMat” company and took on all their old installations and customers. Kardex also joined the USA Kardex company called “Remstar” to become “Kardex Remstar”. These were all very good moves to make themselves stronger in the Warehouse storage systems Market and be one of the leaders in what they do.

After 7 years I was getting bored with my job with Kardex as I was not moving in any direction within the company promotion wise and wanted to do something different. I had asked Kardex UK Director for a course in basic SQL language as we were using SQL heavily in our job now with PowerPick Global and was to help me with my work. The Sales Director at the time while i was there, didn’t seem to care that i needed this course even though he had asked us to tell him if there were things or courses he could put my colleague or myself on to help us do our jobs better. That Sales Director is no longer there in the UK office.

I was now over 7 years with Kardex and one of the most senior software engineers Kardex had employed over the years with many installations under my belt and many complex intergrations into customer’s warehouse systems including SAP ERP systems and even Hospital ERP systems.   I saw my chance to progress my career when I was approached by a competitor of Kardex Remstar to come and work for them.  The company was called Industore Ltd.

Today Kardex Remstar is a very organised company and a force to be recognised by all its competitive companies. Kardex Remstar was hard to sell against when i was working with Industore Ltd., it just depended on what the customer was looking for.  Kardex’s products are very good and competitive prices.

What I mention in this Web page is just my experience of the high and the low times of my career with the company….. the higher ones were to the end of my career with Kardex.
I made a lot of good friends and contacts within Kardex and also my colleages in Kardex Software Germany.