Remember when the purchasing office was at the end of the corridor? It was about the furthest away from the coffee bar as one could get. The office was cold or hot, just like the comparative outside air. Vendor reps would cycle in and out of that section of the building. It was a similar situation in the office of the person in charge of the inventory: she had those special charts pinned to the wall, a whiteboard or two of numbers, and was down the hall from the sales office where the air fluctuated between despair and bravado, depending on the sales numbers du jour.
Today, those departments are one giant atom, run by people who are constantly staring at computer screens as if they were day traders hunting for their evening meal. Those workers are constantly aware of the economics of the business, and their job is to make certain the revenues constantly pour in. These people are the front line between success and failure. Profit or loss.
What happened? What changed? It’s called progress, the realization that one department has to work hand in glove with the others in order to maintain stability within the organization. Inventory has become a hot button: too much and we bleed money; not enough, and we can’t get that IV of money.
Plus & Minus has a client who lives and breathes inventory because his main customers are refineries. Take a look at a refinery, and you will see a huge amount of pipes; they all have to join together. And when they do, there is a need for a gasket, and when a refinery needs a gasket, they need it STAT! ASAP is too slow. Sometimes there is a very caustic product running through the pipes, and as a result, the gaskets can get compromised. And a bad gasket is like a blown head gasket in your car’s engine, except your engine stops running, while a refinery can go BOOM! Thus the need to replace a gasket as soon as a leak is detected.
Our client supplies those gaskets, and he has to have them on the job site yesterday. He is not allowed to run out of gaskets, or he will be run out of the refinery’s vendor list. That’s what is called Sudden Financial Death. Our client has to maintain constant vigilance over his inventory, and he has to have a certain amount of Safety Stock. They are not be sold to anyone, anyhow, for any amount of money. Does new inventory replace them? Of course! But X amount of gaskets must be available for sale immediately. And how about replacements? He has to know which vendor is the most trustworthy and which method of shipment is the most reliable. That means he uses the Plus & Minus built-in purchasing system which evaluates each supplier by a rating system. He can look a vendor in the eye and say “You are only 90.7% efficient/reliable,” and here is the data to back up my statement.
This is the new office dynamic. This is the atomic office. A ball of fusion waiting to satisfy the customers.
