Accurate Fasteners Inc.

AFI offers:

Breadth of products
Commitment to quality
Flexible solutions
Inventory management programs
Kitting and Special Labeling
Financial stability

Breadth of products
With over 60,000 different inventory items in stock and available in our warehouse for immediate delivery, AFI can meet most of your fastener needs in a timely and cost-effective manner. (See the Products section for a fully searchable list.) If we don't have the part you need, we offer specialty sourcing for hard-to-find parts, and we can deliver special items tailored to your prints and specifications.

AFI is always striving to lower customer costs with better fastening solutions, and, as new specialty fastener lines are developed, we are often the first distributor in the New England region invited to distribute these lines.

Commitment to quality
At AFI, we understand the importance of quality at the source. However, our commitment to quality goes beyond mere catchphrases. We are accredited to ISO 9001:2008, and we maintain a full set of ISO reporting systems.

Members of our management team have been extensively involved with quality control issues, receiving congressional appointments to the NIST Advisory Committee for PL 101-592 (the Fastener Quality Act). All of our products and procedures are in compliance with the provisions of this federal legislation.

In addition, both of AFI's founders are past presidents of the National and the New England fastener distributor associations, and key AFI personnel have regularly represented the fastener industry at ASTM, ASME, ANSI and ANMC.

Flexible solutions
We have developed a specialty in "Dock to Stock" computer controlled delivery programs, and we have geared many of our internal processes to ensure the effectiveness of these programs. The objective is to maintain fastener availability while reducing the overall investment (both product costs and people costs) in fasteners.

We offer:

Complete service approach: AFI personnel manage the entire stocking, reordering and systems configuration process.
Collaborative approach: AFI personnel work closely with plant management to ensure adequate hardware supplies.

In order to manage these approaches, we use a variety of tools, including:

Specialized product packaging and customized labels
Bar code labeling, using our AccuBar system
EDI ordering process
Sophisticated supply and demand modeling techniques

Inventory management programs
By diligently managing our inventory, we help you manage your inventory.

Our focus on inventory management systems can be traced to the development of our Assured Inventory Program in 1960. We were the first New England fastener distributor to provide instant, online computer tracking of our entire inventory. We augment this with our own in-house automatic packaging equipment. Our current "best of breed" computer system represents state-of-the-art hardware, software and quality controls.

One of the keys to AFI's success has been our proven "Just-In-Time" (JIT) systems experience. These systems consistently bring significant time and cost savings to facilities that incorporate them, while maintaining full availability of product for production needs. We believe the key is to design simple, easy-to-run processes that work well in a moderately controlled fastener stock location. We analyze product use, suggest economic order quantities and reorder points, and implement the entire process.

Currently, our most popular JIT delivery systems are:

Act Fast Assured Inventory program (card-based)
Act Fast AccuStock™ program (audit-based)

Both delivery systems help streamline the reordering process, eliminating stock-outs and excessive inventory buildup. Plus, AFI personnel work with you to tailor operations to your company's specific technological capabilities. All audits and transmissions to AFI can be as simple as a visual count and faxed status report or automated with a bar-code reader and modem or email transfer.

Kitting and Special Labeling

Meeting special customer requirements is standard operating procedure at Accurate Fasteners. With our automatic packaging equipment as a resource, we are able to meet special needs as they arise. Requirements ranging from assembly kits containing fastener items to 'in-field' repair kits with a large variety of hardware parts are routinely met by our Kit Department.

Kitting
Accurate Fasteners has a well-established kitting capability. Special orders are priced and prepared to customer specifications. Things to keep in mind when considering Kit preparation are:

Number of unique items to be included in the kit. We will kit both fastener and non-fastener items. We will also kit items supplied by our customers or item Accurate supplies.
Number of pieces per item.
Type of packaging required for each item. This varies from plastic bags to boxes, with and without customer artwork and logos.
Type of packaging to be used in the master pack. Same considerations as the previous point.
Typical lead times and storage requirements.

Special Labeling
Our experience in providing customers with special labeling on product packages is extensive. Typically packages include an item description and a quantity. We also provide complete lot # traceability and country of origin information.

If an item has an expiration date, like an adhesive or an adhesive-backed bumper, a lot expiration date is also provided.

Our equipment and systems are automatically set up to also provide the following 'Customer Information' on each package delivered:

Customer Part Number - human readable form.
Bar-code version of Customer Part Number
Customer Bin Location for this item

We can design specialized product labels or even Bin Labels for use in stocking areas.

Financial Stability
As a privately owned company, we can back up our promises with people, systems and long-term inventory commitments, which means you never have to worry about being out of stock on a crucial item. Our financial stability gives us freedom to do what is best for our customers, not our accountants!