(I wrote about this in one of my blogs after returning from a visit to Parallax)
Parallax has this amazing policy which provides them perfect inventory counts, as well as ZERO theft.
If an employee needs/wants something, they simply go to the warehouse, sign for it, and take it off the shelf.
This creates both near PERFECT inventory counts, as well as employees who have amazing knowledge on all their products. If someone takes a Boebot home to build and play with it, I guaranty that they will KNOW a lot of valuable information about it.
Other companies could learn a LOT from this..
@Ken & @Matt: Glad I could help rally some morale on a tough day!
This is the best company I have ever seen and I order from allot of company in the past
If you have a problem with any thing you bought all you have to do is call them and they will work with you
I was blow-en away by this the first time I had something go wrong with something I had bought from them and it was my fault they said OK just pay half of the cost of a new one just send us back the item and we get it here and the the money we will send you a new one
WHA.......T this is UN hear-ed of from other company
This help allot to .....>
Parallax has this amazing policy which provides them perfect inventory counts,
as well as ZERO theft.
If an employee needs/wants something, they simply
go to the warehouse, sign for it, and take it off the shelf.
This creates
both near PERFECT inventory counts, as well as employees who have amazing
knowledge on all their products. If someone takes a Boebot home to build and
play with it, I guaranty that they will KNOW a lot of valuable information about
it.
Other companies could learn a LOT from this..
To me Parallax is a really GOOD company to work with
Parallax keep on ROCKIN and keep up the GREAT customer service you guy are the BEST
This is the best company I have ever seen and I order from allot of company in the past
If you have a problem with any thing you bought all you have to do is call them and they will work with you
I agree, the best company I have ever heard of or delt with. A great company is built on the value it has for it's people and it's customers. I thank everyone at Parallax for what they do and making electronics so much fun for every age of person. I can't wait until my son is old enough to experience the incredible products that Parallax produces and sells.
Thank you and keep up the good work!
I would love a part time job there....is Indiana too far to commute?
Hey guys, I promise we're not trying to show off but we're tickled by the fact you appreciate what we're doing. Your positive feedback is our currency.
Regarding this inventory accuracy stuff, I've told a story on the forums that I'll tell again about our internal inventory management policies and how they affect inventory accuracy. The position of Inventory and Manufacturing Manager is a challenging one in our business - it controls the flow of all raw materials and products to and from our facility. Those familiar with this kind of position know that it's very dependent on good ERP (enterprise resource planning) software that includes a well-designed MRP (materials resource planning) module. Good software can do nearly anything you program it to do, but the problems lie with the humans and how they interact with the software. Our present Inventory and Manufacturing Manager (Jen Fearn) really rocks - she's grown up in the company and has done it all in a dozen years. Prior to her running this position, other managers thought there were other methods of ensuring inventory accuracy. They proposed cages around the product, only having certain staff access parts during certain hours of the day, and lots of forms, forms, and more forms!
Today there is no cage or security, just a few simple processes. Staff can take what you want, when you want it, but you darned well better fill out four pieces of info in a clipboard: name, product sku, date, and how many you took. Internal trust and respect is the backbone of the business. Funny side effect of this open policy is that many technical people who accepted work at Parallax are suddenly faced with unlimited access to anything they want when they're on the inside. This sudden access is pause for thought about what you need and why you may need it. Seems like making it free also slows down how badly we want certain things. Not sure about the psychology there exactly. Nobody has taken home a Quadrover yet, but I may be the first now that inventory is getting low.
It's surprising the power of the trust thing. My company is about the same overall size as Parallax but since our main business is field service we have half a dozen major offices with half a dozen employees each, and about a dozen in our main office, plus a few straggly local techs. The offices are managed by individuals with different styles and since I deal with all of them, I'm fond of telling people it's more like working for six totally different companies at the same time than for a single company.
Our main office pretty much trusts the technicians (and me) to do whatever we need to. If we need a screwdriver or a protoboard, we buy it and expense it and the expense report is very rarely if ever questioned. Personally, this means I run up several hundred dollars a month of charges to ExpressPCB, Ponoko, Parallax, Digikey, Sparkfun, and the occasional Amazon affiliate, and nobody ever asks me anything about what anything is for. As long as the jobs get done, supplying me with what I need is seen as a good investment.
But I have my own projects too, and this previous Monday I several hundred dollars worth of orders for stuff for a personal project which I could easily have expensed, it all being from the usual suppliers. But I absolutely never would do that. When I bought out McTrivia's end stock of PropMod-US's, I paid for it myself because I knew we had other solutions at work in house and it was for my projects that I wanted them. On the flip side I have a Hydra at work I've powered up exactly once, and a C3 I've done nothing with except install a serial port and rip off the laser cut enclosure design. I'm trusted to buy things like that because, on the whole, what I learn from them makes it worthwhile and we know from experience sometimes having a thing on-shelf you think you will never need saves your butt one day when you find a need for it.
Some of our offices aren't managed this way though, and there is a real culture conflict when our techs equipped with trucks loaded with tools and common replacement parts work with theirs who are expected to go back to the shop for anything more exotic than a screwdriver. When our guys complain that it's a waste of time, these managers shrug and say it's billable. That makes our guys FUME. Because while they want to make money for the company too, they don't want to do it by ripping off customers for time you could have saved if you carried a dang drill motor and some bits in your work vehicle.
Anyway, I was going to try to wheedle a quadrover but now that I have replaced my gas mower with a cordless powered reel model, I have other plans :-)
I have some thin weeds that lie down instead of getting cut. I find that after they're exposed most of them die of in a dayor two; the rest are easy to knock down with the (ironically gas powered) string trimmer.
We had to check out parts in the computer so that If we ended up getting close to low stock the new order to the warehouse would fill in time to keep the stuff on our shelfs to make sure a real custumer was not in danger of not haveing there parts in stock .
In stock stuff was cost + 10% .
Let Me tell ya for a Electronics student in his prime years this was a godsend to me .
Because I had such quick access to parts I only bought what I needed . with Very few spares .
EG a amp that needed 2 LM741s I would get 4 . now I get 2 . If I toast one I can run back and get a new one . and casue I visited the candy store every day to work I was less then 24H from parts . I never needed to panic and horde parts .
I LOVED that job with all my life but sadly it was WAY under what would sustaine anyone in LA so I was a" In college job " not a life long job .
I learned SO much from working for them . for a while I had close to the entre NTE chip line in my head. I knew so much about how parts work in the REAL world and had the joys of solving peoples issues from a broken tatoo gun to a $10,000 Audio studio I was asked to make work . To selling parts to the US Govt.
I was known as "help desk Peter" as I was the go to guy for questions . I had kids form Cal Poly to Harvy Mudd to JPL come to me . and to this day People Stil ask the others who work there "
Is peter going to be in today ?"
I visited my old job while I was on spring break right after UPEW and no more then 10 Min that I was that was there getting some parts I was queing a line and was back at it selling and awnsering quesiions.
99.965% Accuracy? If only the State of California Franchise Tax Board had such a level of diligence.
I do realize that there are other reasons for keeping such tight control: effective cost accounting, just in time manufacturing; and the potential to qualify for government contract work. But for the average small business, accuracy never gets close to that. It just isn't cost effective to have people keeping such tight control.
The mysteries of inventory shrinkage (meaning damage, theft, and waste) are indeed mysterious.
Even for a small manufacturing business, inventory control is important. It's true that losing a few resistors from a reel amounts to just pennies. But when you don't know they're missing and set up to do a run of boards that needs the quantity you think you have, things can get very expensive. That's why one of my first criteria for choosing a company to do consignment PCB assembly is that they have tight inventory control.
Comments
Parallax has this amazing policy which provides them perfect inventory counts, as well as ZERO theft.
If an employee needs/wants something, they simply go to the warehouse, sign for it, and take it off the shelf.
This creates both near PERFECT inventory counts, as well as employees who have amazing knowledge on all their products. If someone takes a Boebot home to build and play with it, I guaranty that they will KNOW a lot of valuable information about it.
Other companies could learn a LOT from this..
@Ken & @Matt: Glad I could help rally some morale on a tough day!
This is the best company I have ever seen and I order from allot of company in the past
If you have a problem with any thing you bought all you have to do is call them and they will work with you
I was blow-en away by this the first time I had something go wrong with something I had bought from them and it was my fault they said OK just pay half of the cost of a new one just send us back the item and we get it here and the the money we will send you a new one
WHA.......T this is UN hear-ed of from other company
This help allot to .....>
To me Parallax is a really GOOD company to work with
Parallax keep on ROCKIN and keep up the GREAT customer service you guy are the BEST
I agree, the best company I have ever heard of or delt with. A great company is built on the value it has for it's people and it's customers. I thank everyone at Parallax for what they do and making electronics so much fun for every age of person. I can't wait until my son is old enough to experience the incredible products that Parallax produces and sells.
Thank you and keep up the good work!
I would love a part time job there....is Indiana too far to commute?
and all this time, I thought I was the only one with a <60% accuracy in "sock-count"!
-Matt
You guys must have a lot of hard-to-count little surface mount socks.
OUCH!! Nobody brought up any numbers......especially in the 60% range.......YIKES!
I just was saying I'm not in the 99.965% range
C.W.
Regarding this inventory accuracy stuff, I've told a story on the forums that I'll tell again about our internal inventory management policies and how they affect inventory accuracy. The position of Inventory and Manufacturing Manager is a challenging one in our business - it controls the flow of all raw materials and products to and from our facility. Those familiar with this kind of position know that it's very dependent on good ERP (enterprise resource planning) software that includes a well-designed MRP (materials resource planning) module. Good software can do nearly anything you program it to do, but the problems lie with the humans and how they interact with the software. Our present Inventory and Manufacturing Manager (Jen Fearn) really rocks - she's grown up in the company and has done it all in a dozen years. Prior to her running this position, other managers thought there were other methods of ensuring inventory accuracy. They proposed cages around the product, only having certain staff access parts during certain hours of the day, and lots of forms, forms, and more forms!
Today there is no cage or security, just a few simple processes. Staff can take what you want, when you want it, but you darned well better fill out four pieces of info in a clipboard: name, product sku, date, and how many you took. Internal trust and respect is the backbone of the business. Funny side effect of this open policy is that many technical people who accepted work at Parallax are suddenly faced with unlimited access to anything they want when they're on the inside. This sudden access is pause for thought about what you need and why you may need it. Seems like making it free also slows down how badly we want certain things. Not sure about the psychology there exactly. Nobody has taken home a Quadrover yet, but I may be the first now that inventory is getting low.
Ken Gracey
-Phil
Our main office pretty much trusts the technicians (and me) to do whatever we need to. If we need a screwdriver or a protoboard, we buy it and expense it and the expense report is very rarely if ever questioned. Personally, this means I run up several hundred dollars a month of charges to ExpressPCB, Ponoko, Parallax, Digikey, Sparkfun, and the occasional Amazon affiliate, and nobody ever asks me anything about what anything is for. As long as the jobs get done, supplying me with what I need is seen as a good investment.
But I have my own projects too, and this previous Monday I several hundred dollars worth of orders for stuff for a personal project which I could easily have expensed, it all being from the usual suppliers. But I absolutely never would do that. When I bought out McTrivia's end stock of PropMod-US's, I paid for it myself because I knew we had other solutions at work in house and it was for my projects that I wanted them. On the flip side I have a Hydra at work I've powered up exactly once, and a C3 I've done nothing with except install a serial port and rip off the laser cut enclosure design. I'm trusted to buy things like that because, on the whole, what I learn from them makes it worthwhile and we know from experience sometimes having a thing on-shelf you think you will never need saves your butt one day when you find a need for it.
Some of our offices aren't managed this way though, and there is a real culture conflict when our techs equipped with trucks loaded with tools and common replacement parts work with theirs who are expected to go back to the shop for anything more exotic than a screwdriver. When our guys complain that it's a waste of time, these managers shrug and say it's billable. That makes our guys FUME. Because while they want to make money for the company too, they don't want to do it by ripping off customers for time you could have saved if you carried a dang drill motor and some bits in your work vehicle.
Anyway, I was going to try to wheedle a quadrover but now that I have replaced my gas mower with a cordless powered reel model, I have other plans :-)
-Phil
I have some thin weeds that lie down instead of getting cut. I find that after they're exposed most of them die of in a dayor two; the rest are easy to knock down with the (ironically gas powered) string trimmer.
My old Job was the same way .
The rules were simple .
We had to check out parts in the computer so that If we ended up getting close to low stock the new order to the warehouse would fill in time to keep the stuff on our shelfs to make sure a real custumer was not in danger of not haveing there parts in stock .
In stock stuff was cost + 10% .
Let Me tell ya for a Electronics student in his prime years this was a godsend to me .
Because I had such quick access to parts I only bought what I needed . with Very few spares .
EG a amp that needed 2 LM741s I would get 4 . now I get 2 . If I toast one I can run back and get a new one . and casue I visited the candy store every day to work I was less then 24H from parts . I never needed to panic and horde parts .
I LOVED that job with all my life but sadly it was WAY under what would sustaine anyone in LA so I was a" In college job " not a life long job .
I learned SO much from working for them . for a while I had close to the entre NTE chip line in my head. I knew so much about how parts work in the REAL world and had the joys of solving peoples issues from a broken tatoo gun to a $10,000 Audio studio I was asked to make work . To selling parts to the US Govt.
I was known as "help desk Peter" as I was the go to guy for questions . I had kids form Cal Poly to Harvy Mudd to JPL come to me . and to this day People Stil ask the others who work there "
Is peter going to be in today ?"
I visited my old job while I was on spring break right after UPEW and no more then 10 Min that I was that was there getting some parts I was queing a line and was back at it selling and awnsering quesiions.
Peter
I do realize that there are other reasons for keeping such tight control: effective cost accounting, just in time manufacturing; and the potential to qualify for government contract work. But for the average small business, accuracy never gets close to that. It just isn't cost effective to have people keeping such tight control.
The mysteries of inventory shrinkage (meaning damage, theft, and waste) are indeed mysterious.
-Phil