Rayco Industries, based in Richmond, Va., has found that its Pallet Division gets a great return on its heavy investment in customer service, which ranges from helping customers to diagnose problems to providing a fast turnaround on parts needed to keep their nailing machines up and running.
Rayco builds, installs, troubleshoots and services two nailing machines for the pallet industry – the Pallet Pro and the Edge – both used widely by new pallet manufacturers and pallet recyclers. The Pallet Pro is an automatic, high-output pneumatic machine that has the capacity to produce over 1,000 pallets in an eight-hour shift. The Edge is also a pneumatically-driven pallet nailing and stacking machine, but is less automated compared to the Pallet Pro. It has the capacity to produce 450-plus pallets in a single eight-hour shift. Both machines feature conveniently located adjustments, modular nail-position finger tabs, and the ability to vary the operating speed just to name a few.
All the parts for these machines are made on site in Rayco’s design and fabrication shop, which includes a 28,000-square-foot main building and an adjacent 6,000-square-foot facility. This gives the company an edge, as it is able to strictly control the inventory it has in stock on any given day. “We do have some commercial parts as well, but we supply many of our own parts that go into our machines,” said Devin McDaniel, Rayco’s Pallet Division manager.
Rayco has customers across the United States and Canada along with a small customer base continuing to grow in Australia. Rayco is set to ship an Edge machine to a new Aussie customer by the end of this month. “Some customers we never hear from and others we hear from on a regular basis. They call us and we can usually diagnose the problem over the phone. Sometimes it takes a bit of a back and forth and, of course, it’s always good if they can email us a photo,” McDaniel said.
Rayco started building its nailers around 1990, which means there are a lot of older machines out there still in use that need different parts than the newer machines, he said.
“We are on it daily as far as sending out orders – packaging, pulling parts, and keeping stock for inventory,” McDaniel said. “Customers do call at the end of the day sometimes where it is an emergency for them and they need something out that day. We try to get it out to them the same day using next day air because it does mean an awful lot to those guys because they can’t afford to have their machines down.”
“The main thing is having parts on the shelf to do that,” he explained, which makes tracking and maintaining the right inventory key to being able to provide parts fast.
“Something I think we do very well is our customer service,” McDaniel said. “It seems to be very much appreciated by our customers, and in turn, we get a lot of repeat business from them so it helps us out in the long run also.”
To learn more about Rayco’s pallet nailing machines, visit http://www.raycoindustries.com/pallet-products.html or call 800-505-7111.
