VELOCITY - DEE JACOB [130]
“Huh,” said Murphy.
“And then sometimes if we see that we’re getting really low, we’ll place a bigger order,” said Jayro, “only to have everything show up – and sit there month after month above the max level. Most of this of course is on computer – on WING – so it’s automatic for the most part.”
“On WING?” Murphy asked suspiciously. “What version?”
“WING four-point-seven. The Lean version.”
“Is it playin’ games with us?”
“Not supposed to be. I’ve asked Kurt, and he says, no. It’s a pull-through inventory model – nothing is produced until a customer asks for it.”
“And what does Kurt say about the out-of-stocks?” asked Murphy.
“He says that we – meaning me and my materials people – must have miscalculated the reorder quantity. Then, kind of out of the side of his mouth, he says to make the reorder a little bigger next time – but not too big.”
“Of course not,” said Murphy. “Inventory has been ‘leaned’ down, because we don’t want too much sitting and doing nothing. That would be waste.”
“Anyway,” said Jayro, “that’s what we’ve been doing. We bump up the reorder quantity, or we play with total min-max ratio, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes we go out of stock like lemonade on a hot day, and sometimes the bumped-up quantity just sits there month after month, barely touched. And it’s not like a winter-summer thing that you can predict we’ll use less or more. It’s … well, it’s unpredictable.”
Murphy held up a short length of the hollow veal bone and peered through it like a telescope.
“Well, let’s clean up and get back to it,” said Murphy. “By the way, the trout was fantastic.”
“Skilled preparation,” said Jayro, holding up the propane torch. “That’s the key.”
“That and fresh fish. And as for the inventory issues, we have to get this solved. Assuming we soon start getting a steady flow of clearances from Rockville, we cannot afford to drop the ball. Let me think and do some checking, and you do the same, and we’ll talk again in a few days.”
Some days later, Murphy walked into the Oakton plant early in the morning and found Jayro at his desk next to the Cooler. He poured a steamy cup of coffee into a Hi-T mug from Jayro’s pot, pulled up a chair, and sat down. Jayro gave him a nod in greeting, but was absorbed with some graphs before him on the screen of his terminal, and held up the index finger of his left hand indicating he would turn his full attention to Murphy in a moment. When he did, Murphy was staring at him with a silly grin on his face.
“Yes?” asked Jayro.
“Time,” said Murphy.
“Time?”
“Time is the invisible resource required in everything we do here,” said Murphy.
“Is that a fact?” Jayro chided.
“Perhaps, Jayro, you would like to write that down for posterity.”
“Well, I would, Murph, but I’m running low on paper.”
“Time to reorder then,” said Murphy. “Which brings me to the purpose of my visit. Your unpredictable out-of-stocks that we talked about a few days ago. I think that time may hold the answer.”
“How so?”
“With a min-max system, the order is triggered once the minimum safety stock level is reached. Now, the minimum reorder size is a fixed quantity, but the time between reorders is variable. It could be five days or five months or far longer between reorders – the timing between the purchase events varies.”
“Just for the sake of argument, what’s wrong with that?” asked Jayro.
“What’s wrong is what you described over lunch a few days ago. The time it takes to replenish may not be quick enough to cover demand. You follow me?”
“I think so. In fact, I think that is what has been happening.”
“So in periods of peak demand there may not be time for a reorder to be filled before the safety stock is exhausted. And by the same token, if you bump up the quantity to compensate and demand then falls, then we could be sitting on that stock for a very long time.”
“It’s been known to happen,” said Jayro.
“But suppose the order trigger was not based on having used up a fixed quantity; suppose the timing was fixed and the quantity was whatever was used during the fixed-time