Inventory Woes Part 2

Well, we’ve been backordered since August 21^st.  Despite that disappointing fact I am happy to announce that on Monday, everyone’s back orders are shipping out.  I have all the parts in and everything’s ready to go. 

So what happened?  In hindsight, I should have made a few different decisions, and I think probably the biggest issue was my lack of thinking more than one step ahead – i.e. focusing on the immediate issues at the expense of the longer term ones.  Lesson learned!

Sadly, we’re not out of the woods yet.  Orders didn’t fall off after the backorder started -- which I expected – in fact they grew instead and the result is that the majority of the new inventory is shipping out to cover the back orders and another somewhat briefer backorder period is probably going to start.  If you get your orders in over the next few days they’ll go out early this week, but after that there will probably be a backorder for a week or two.

One takeaway from all this is that I’m becoming much more bullish on this product and am willing to place much larger orders.  I’ve had RFQs out all week and a bunch of attractive quotes have come in.  Of course this is a longer term solution, so I still am quite frustrated about the current situation.  But I believe Logic is an awesome product and I’m going to do the best I can to do a great job with it despite these stumbling blocks.  Thank you to all the heroes who are patiently waiting on their Logics – the wait sucks but I think you’ll really like the product when you get it.  Maybe like it enough to forget about how long it took to get =)

Some takeaways--

• Take growth into account when predicting future inventory levels
• Assume suppliers will be late and plan this in
• Start outsourcing things you did yourself at the beginning as soon as possible
• Use local manufacturing for small runs.
• Go though larger-qty quoting process earlier in the game.
• Sanity check the inventory status more often.