Cadre Press Release

DENVER, COLORADO – 1/11/2006

Cadre Technologies today announced that West Marine, an industry leading retail, wholesale and catalog provider of marine equipment and supplies, has selected Cadre’s Simplified GainSharing Program to incent its non-exempt associate work force.

The Simplified GainSharing Program will be implemented by Cadre’s Logistics Services Group in West Marine’s highly productive Hollister, California 260,000 square-foot warehouse facility.  Over the past few years, the Hollister operation has reduced its labor requirements for the same volume of business by 72%.  Hollister is also highly accurate performing at a rate of 99.8% error-free.

“Despite our progress over the past few years, we feel there is still room for improvement in both areas,” says Armando Tellez, Assistant Vice President, Operations for Hollister.  “We looked at more than one option but were most impressed with the Cadre approach.  It is simple in design, well thought out,  and drops right in on top of our engineered standards program already in place.”

Simplified GainSharing will provide a detailed frame work to reward associates in all direct labor functions initially, and ultimately, to indirect labor areas, including clerical workers.   The program’s components include a “plug and play” approach where the design and implementation are simple and quickly installed as compared to traditional gain sharing programs.  The program is built on a foundation of individual incentives using an unlimited sliding scale for incentive calculation.  Payouts are made monthly in the form of hourly wage changes. 

“West Marine already understood that we don’t know the upper limits of human potential, but that well motivated associates can greatly improve both productivity and quality levels,” says Ron Hounsell, Cadre’s Director of Logistics Services.  “Even high performance organizations have room for significant improvement and amazing things happen when associate and management goals are aligned.  Simplified GainSharing makes this much easier to do.”

Simplified GainSharing has been successfully implemented in large and small facilities (union and non-union) across the country including operations with high SKU counts (in excess of 50,000 SKUs) doing pallet, case and broken case picking.  The program applies well to wholesale, retail and fulfillment operations alike.

West Marine’s Senior Vice President of Logistics Services, Patrick Murphy, plans to roll the program out to its other distribution operations once Hollister is up and running early in 2006.  “We’re looking forward to sustained improvement in productivity and quality in all our operations.  The return on investment for Cadre’s program makes it an easy decision and it’s very well suited to our needs.  Our associates are eager to get into it, too.”