During the Thanksgiving holiday of 2010, our Chief Financial Officer, David Lau, visited his wife’s family in Wisconsin. Mrs. Lau’s hometown is about 25 miles north of Plymouth, where a Toro Distribution Center is located. David took advantage of the opportunity and scheduled a tour of the facilities with Jon Scott, the operations manager, who took David on a two hour tour.

The facility is approx. 400,000 sq. ft. and houses approx. 90,000 parts.  They run three shifts and have employees on site from 6 a.m. to midnight and ship product worldwide.  All picking and packing is done manually, which surprised me for such a large facility, but automation is very expensive.  They were checking and reviewing PTP’s most recent RGA (return goods authorization), and commented that it looked good, and there were no issues.

David thought we’d like to see where most of our parts come from.  So, he included a few pictures of the facility.  The picture of the small part carousels is only a small sample; they have about 10 identical rows to the one in the picture.  They have 25 shipping stations which are fully occupied by all three shifts during the busy season.  The picture of the highway frontage shows a reflection of David’s rental car dash board.  He opted not to get out of the car to take the picture, because it was 15 degrees!

Thank you David for the great story and pictures!

TORO DISTRIBUTION CENTER - PLYMOUTH, WISCONSIN