It was 4:11 P.M. on a now frantic Sunday afternoon when Martin Nower, senior scale technician for 26 years with Hammel Scale Co., Kansas City, KS, called Rice Lake’s after-hours emergency service line. “My customer had a scale down and needed it up and running yesterday. I went to his plant and found two bad load cells that we had been trying to get him to stock as it is a critical scale, but he hadn’t done so.

“I punched in the number, expecting to get a hold of no one. Lo and behold, Glenn answered the phone!”

Glenn Zalusky was on call that weekend. Glenn jotted down the basic details of Martin’s situation and called Chris Olsen, inside sales manager. According to Chris, “Martin’s customer had a bagging system failure at a 24/7 plant and he was desperate. Martin knew Rice Lake carried a tremendous amount of stock, so he called hoping to pull off some type of shipment on a Sunday afternoon.

“Of course, all the normal freight distribution channels are shut down on Sunday, so we had to be creative. I logged onto the airline site and searched for outbound flights from Minneapolis/St. Paul to Kansas City. There was only one direct flight, and it was scheduled to depart at 1 p.m. Monday. Martin said that was fine, and he would tell his customer the best he could do was Monday.”

Ten minutes later, Martin called back, “Is there anything else we can do?”

Chris told Martin there were a couple of other options, “We could start driving and meet someone from your company half way, or start the process of quoting a direct haul via a delivery service.”

“Go ahead. We need to get this up and running.”

Chris arranged through FedEx® for a husband and wife driving team to pick up the load cells at the plant in Rice Lake 11 p.m. Sunday, then drive all night, and deliver three cells Monday morning in Kansas City.

Chris set up automated emails so all parties could track the package until its arrival in the morning.

Here is how Martin tells the story:

“A truck came from the Twin Cities to Rice Lake, picked up the cells at 11:06 Sunday night! I had the cells in Kansas City Monday morning at 8:45. In the 32 years I have been in the scale business I have not had service any better than this, and most of the time not nearly as good.”

At the end of that long Monday, Martin emailed Chris:

Terica Schamberger, customer service representative, tells of another urgent search for a Rice Lake UMC600 digital weight indicator. A distributor called from Colorado about a batching operation in Pennsylvania. They needed a UMC600 ASAP or the plant might be closed down. Terica called the nearest distributor who did not have a UMC600. Nor did the second-closest distributor. Terica could not find a UMC600 anywhere in Pennsylvania.

In addition to her Inside Sales duties, Terica schedules the Rice Lake tour bus visits and had recently been making arrangements with a distributor in Virginia. On a hunch, Terica called him, did he have the elusive UMC600?

“No.”

He looked once more and found a UMC600 with a note on it: Used.

That would not do for Terica.

It was nearly 5 p.m. when the distributor in Virginia called Terica back. He had found another UMC600! They had tested it, and it was ready to go.

The distributor in Colorado arranged to send a courier to Virginia to bring the UMC600 to the batching plant in Pennsylvania. Terica and Rice Lake were big heroes at the jobsite in Pennsylvania.

Russ Schnacky, technical sales specialist, is one of Rice Lake’s two early birds. The other is Dave Jalowitz, also a technical sales specialist. Russ calls Dave and himself the “Clean-up Crew” because many early mornings (they start at 6:30 a.m.) especially Mondays, they are busy answering calls about mission-critical deliveries that start with “Where?”, “When?” and “Why?” Russ and Dave spend many of their early hours following up on previously entered
orders. They physically check inventory and track shipments, proof of delivery documents, counter-to-counter deliveries and flight schedules, besides providing a calming voice and reassuring answers to those sometimes frantic early bird customers.

Wendy Carlson, senior customer service representative, recently handled a counter-to-counter load cell delivery to Alaska. She made the follow-up call to see if the cells had arrived. Yes, they did. Also—the DOT inspector blew a tire and was running three hours behind. The customer was very happy to have time to calibrate that scale before welcoming the inspector.

In that mission critical case, Mark Johnson, Jr., director of customer service, made the run from Rice Lake to the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport to put those cells on a direct flight to Alaska.

Inside Sales people need to be very knowledgeable in order to help distributors find solutions. Working as a team, the department has a wide range of scale experts to tap instantly to provide assistance to clients anywhere in the world—at any time on any day.

They love the rush.