Socrates Says

Tablets, PDA’s and Laptops

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 Most Important Part

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 […]

Maintenance

Over the years more and more people have realized that maintenance on a piece of capital equipment is one of the more critical activities to conduct to reduce the owning and operating costs of that piece of equipment. This is true for your vehicle or washing machine just as much as for your machine. There […]

A new discussion on market share

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 […]

Economic Order Quantity

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 […]

Customer Retention

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 […]