Socrates Says

Over the years we have collected labor to apply to work orders in a myriad of manners. We started from an attendance time card which the mechanics completed at the end of the day telling us what times they worked on which jobs. Then we moved to individual job time cards while still retaining an […]

The first article I wrote for an Industry publication I called “The Only Part That Matters.” This is of course the part that you don’t have available. I was referencing the fact that too often we are driven by metrics. Off the shelf availability has to be more than 90% of some such number. That […]

Al Wiley, an executive of Xpectmor, sent us a comment on our recent Market Share post. He says that “market share is the definitive measure of customer satisfaction.” Of course he is right. The measure of market share, however,  is what causes the dilemma for many of us. In the equipment market it is reasonably […]

The blog on variable lead times for each part number seems to have struck a chord so with that in mind I thought it appropriate to kick over another sacred cow in parts inventory management –  The Economic Order Quantity. The EOQ has been around since 1905 when Mr. Kerr and Mr. Norton developed the […]

In the 1990’s, three professors, Sasser, Hesketh and Schlesinger from Harvard Business School wrote a book called “The Service Profit Chain.” It was for me the definitive book on customer retention. They posited that in the Industrial Distribution world if you increased customer retention by 5% you would increase the profitability of the business by […]

If you had to choose between customer satisfaction and profitability, what would be your choice? I would take customer satisfaction as without satisfied customers the ability to make profit is going to have a short life.   How to measure customer satisfaction becomes the challenge. Some people define it as repeat business; others measure the […]