The history of Legend Valve & Fitting Inc. begins with the company’s service commitment to its wholesale partners.
“Our entire culture is focused on taking care of our wholesale customer,” said Wade Tennant, director of marketing at Legend Valve & Fitting Inc. “All of our business processes and operations are designed around increasing our customers’ efficiencies, even at the cost of our own. We pride ourselves on being the industry’s low-cost supplier.”
Products and Services
At Legend, service is an obsession that is the backbone of the company’s Downstream Thinking® Guaranteed Performance. “We have spent more than 33 years perfecting that performance, and we believe our customers understand this,” said Jeff Shreiner, vice president of sales. “Being selected Vendor of the Year by IMARK is a sign that our customers believe in our service commitment to them. The last two years have been challenging for our economy and the supply chain constraints are unprecedented. But we have stayed focused on our Guaranteed Performance. We are not perfect, and we are far from where we want to be, but we are committed to getting our customers what we have guaranteed them.”
At Legend, Guaranteed Performance means:
- Every order is processed within 24 hours, or the customer gets 5% off the order
- The promise of 100% line-item fill rate or 5% off the backorder
- Guaranteed 100% line-item accuracy or 5% off the error
- No minimums on any order sizes
- No case or pack quantities for orders
- Returns of unused materials without a restocking fee
- Products backed with the Legendary 5/25 Product Warranty, which replaces any valve or fitting proven to be defective within five years of installation. Legend will also reimburse the installing contractor $25 to offset labor costs.
The company’s product offering is broad-based and, of course, with its service orientation, provides excellent value to IMARK Plumbing members. “One of our committed slogans is: Everything you need behind the wall®. We think that is what makes us so successful with IMARK members. Legend believes that providing the lowest cost to wholesalers is a better value proposition and lowers our customer’s overall costs of doing business,” Shreiner said.
Recent Organizational Changes
Legend has always had a commitment to innovation from new products to the processes that create internal
efficiencies. Although inbound order processing through the company’s customer service group has been highly automated for about a decade, the fulfillment and warehouse management side, while efficient, was largely a manual process until 2020.
At the Michigan facility, “employees pushed heavy carts with heavy products across a 275,000-square-foot warehouse,” recalled Larry Emmert, vice president of operations at Legend. “Despite the automation we did, we still had many manual parts in the middle of the order management process. We knew we had to improve those steps.”
Building off the fundamental questions of how Legend Valve could improve service levels to customers and increase throughput with existing resources, the company began evaluating its warehouse automation in earnest in 2019. Emmert and his team began reviewing complex picking and conveyor automation services, pick-to-light and goods-to-persons technology, and collaborative robot systems (cobots). Two things Emmert knew he wanted from any solution were a “reasonable time frame” for implementation and “to get the biggest bang for the buck.”
Legend Valve, 6 River Systems and Packsize International launched a custom-designed fulfillment process in January 2020 to enable Legend Valve to pick, pack and ship orders more quickly and efficiently through the Michigan warehouse. Legend Valve also integrated this new order fulfillment process with its JD Edwards enterprise resource planning system.
By January 2020, Legend Valve, 6 River Systems (6RS) and Packsize International launched a custom-designed fulfillment process to enable Legend Valve to pick, pack and ship orders more quickly and efficiently through the Michigan warehouse. Legend Valve also integrated this new order fulfillment process with its JD Edwards enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. From a 30,000-foot perspective, the solution looks like this: Packsize analyzes and efficiently cubes orders as they come in with the goal of optimizing packaging. 6RS intelligently allocates orders to optimize workflows and pick paths with its collaborative Chucks robots. Legend Valve has 10 Chucks deployed in the picking operation.
“Packsize handles the right-size packaging,” Emmert said. “6RS looks at it from the angle of what needs to be done in the building to fulfill the order before various carrier cutoff times, and how the workers and the Chucks can navigate to particular locations.”
On a drilled-down level, 6RS calculates and prioritizes picking routes, employee walking time, cobot/Chuck travel time across the warehouse and coordinates multi-location order picking in the warehouse between different pickers. The Chucks also carry all the picked products, eliminating the need for associates to push heavy carts around the warehouse. Additionally, each Chuck has a monitor that displays product photos making it easier for warehouse associates to identify the products they pick, which, in turn, improves order fulfillment accuracy.
Chucks bring the warehouse associate down the correct aisle, stop in front of the right section, show a picture of the product and identify the exact box or color-coded location. Associates, who have a bluetooth scanner on their finger, scan the picked product and the cobot verifies that the correct product was selected. “With 10,000 products on Legend Valve’s shelves, picking the right product is critical to supporting the strategy of 100% order accuracy,” said Emmert.
The unit’s onboard mobile printer and packaging materials also allow the warehouse associate to bag and label individual pieces as soon as they’re picked, which reduces the number of touchpoints in getting the order out. Since customers are not required to order case-size quantities and can buy however many parts they need, this aspect of the solution is a valuable time-saver and improves overall packing efficiency, Emmert notes.
Legend Valve has already reported significant improvements since the January 2020 go-live date: pick rates doubled after the automation was implemented, same-day shipping improved significantly and transportation costs, dunnage requirements, products damaged in transit, employee fatigue and employee training time were reduced.
Another innovative investment, started in 2015, is HyperPure. “Our pipe business has continued to grow,” Tennant said. “Because of the decision to manufacture PE-RT instead of another PEX, it has positioned Legend well given all of the resin and supply chain constraints over the last 18 months. Many IMARK customers turned to Legend when their existing suppliers were unable to provide them material.”
HyperPure is an innovative Bimodal Polyethylene Technology, which is a two-reaction process that maximizes the creation of “tie chains” by combining long chains at high molecular weight (strength) with optimal placement of short chains for lower density (flexibility). It is strong, flexible and pure—the first flexible plastic hot and cold potable water tube that is 100% recyclable with no chemical additives or additional processes are necessary, thus it is tasteless and odorless and does not need to be flushed. HyperPure can be fused. “Once it’s manufactured, you can smell it and taste it and realize that this doesn’t have the typical plastic-y smelling plastic when it comes off the production line,” said Tennant. “It’s unique that way.”
Legend’s business mantra revolves around customer service and doing things other companies won’t. Orders that come in before 5 p.m. get processed and put on a truck for next-day delivery.
Company Culture
Legend’s success as a business is derived from its customer service approach. “By keeping our objective on astonishing customers every day, we keep that at the front of our mind,” said Tennant. “Having
a full-time reception is still paramount to that customer service. How many times have you reached out to a company
only to be put into the never-ending voicemail loop? Not at Legend—there is no voicemail or automation to our customer service We have a fully-trained customer service team to support you and your business, striving to achieve 100% problem resolution in one call.”
Legend’s business mantra revolves around customer service and doing things other companies won’t. Orders that come in before 5 p.m. get processed and put on a truck for next-day delivery.
Company Goals
The company’s immediate goal is to continue to grow its business as the low-cost supplier of choice. “We expect the market conditions to remain very tight in terms of labor, transportation and continued bottle necks in global supply chains,” Tennant said.
IMARK Plumbing Membership
Being a manufacturer/supplier to IMARK has provided Legend a direct line to a captive audience within its target customer base, which effectively supports the business. “As we continue to grow our relationships with members, more IMARK members have turned to us as their low-cost supplier
choice,” said Shreiner. “As a result, we have developed strong relationships with these members.”
For more information, visit legendvalve.com.