Socrates Says

This is a most interesting time, isn’t it? I listened to Jimmy Rogers on CNBC the other night. He was pointing out there is an election this year in the United States, there is one in France. Germany has an election next year. In fact there are 40 governments that will face elections this year. […]

A number of years ago, 2005 to be precise, Ken Blanchard and Barbara Glanz published a short book called “Johnny the Bagger.” It is based on a story than Ms. Glanz used in her talks. Her signature, for her customer service talks, was a room surrounded on all sides by colorful posters. She told stories about […]

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 […]