How do you handle car stock?

[Scott_Lewis]

We are a fairly small outfit with 5 tech at our location. With the exception of out-of-town calls, all of our calls are run from the shop with at most 3 stops before coming back to the shop.

We grab a 'service kit' for the model(s) we are going to service. Run the calls. Then when we get back, we restock the kits and put them back on the shelf. Nobody carries any car stock to speak of.

I'm wondering if most of you run your calls in a similar manner or do you have car-stock that will enable you to stay out in the field all day? We will have to change our methods if we ever change over to using the dispatch services of Eautomate. How do you all handle this?

[fixthecopier]

Scott, we are about the same size, we have 7 techs and 3 IT guys. I used to have an outrageous amount of truck inventory. I would accumulate it by checking out things I thought I needed and not turning them back in when I did not use them. It made me more efficient in the field, but since our stock is signed out by hand and transferred in our computer system manually it left a lot of room for error. We would do inventory twice a year and I would come up $6,000 to $10,000 short each time. I could always show lots of mistakes by our admin to account for this, but it still looks bad. The owner never said anything as I told him neither me or my friends have copiers at the house. 90% of my territory is 15 min from shop, so to combat the inventory problem, I emptied my truck and cary only what I know I need for the calls in my hand. If I need something, I drive back and get it or they can wait til next day.
This inventory thing causes some hard feelings at the shop, like when I yelled "there is no FUCKING way I lost $8000 worth of shit!" at my manager. She got mad and would not even say a word about inventory the next time even though it showed I was missing even more.
To combat this I emptied my truck except for my stuff, carry bare minimum and every few weeks get a printout of what they say I have so I can get it corrected. Truck stock is a good idea if you keep up with it, but a lot of that depends on how good the office staff is.

[unisys12]

Same situation, small company with 5 techs at our main location and 2 at another. The techs at our main location do not carry any parts with them and just grab what they need for the day or group of calls they are going on. The other two techs at the other office carry PM kits with them, that way they don't have to incomplete calls for PM's. That is only because their territory is a lot more rural than ours.

When setting up our new eAutomate system earlier this year, I wanted to set up car stock for each tech. Just create a warehouse for each tech, under their territory warehouse. Then place a predetermined stock in each truck based on the machines they work on. When they wanted to remove a part from the shelf and place it in their truck, all they would have to do is transfer the part from the warehouse to their car through eAutomate. Same goes for restocking, which would of course be their responsibility. Then, when closing calls, have the parts shown as used from the techs warehouse (inventory) and not the territory warehouse. Then, if the part was not used for whatever reason, they could just re-transfer back into the territory warehouse.

Anyway, when I brought this up to the techs all hell broke loose. They got so pissed at me! Telling me I was going to make their job so much harder for nothing. You know, the typical whining crap. So I said to hell with it. The managers are not going to allow car stock unless there is a way to track it. If the techs don't want to do their part, then they wont get car stock. That simple!

[blackcat4866]

I've done it both ways. The service kit limits the amount of stock any tech has at any one time. It also answers the question: "As long as your here and have nothing else to do, can you look at these other 10 machines?" The answer is: "No, I didn't come stocked to do those calls. Please submit a request."

During most of the last 20 years I've carried $5K to $12K of carstock, and stayed in the field for about a week at a time. The difficulty with tracking all this cartsock is not at the technician's end. There are typically too many hands in the system, transferring parts here & there without the tech's knowledge. For it to really work is to get a monthly report of all the transfers and current stock, and to confirm its accuracy item by item. You'll be surprised how many mistakes come up.

As things are now I only have to keep track of the whole service department (that is: myself), so it's pretty easy. There's only one person handling all the parts, and I can kick his ass anytime I need to (again, myself).

For years I've heard threats of making techs financially responsible for their carstock. The only way this can work is to take away all those other hands doing transfers. =^..^=

[schooltech]

Everyone makes great points here. The integrity of the parts 'situation' has a lot of variables to make it work. The last place I was at had their MWA software tied to our crackberries and what not, and it was integrated with OMD and some other software I believe. Anyway, I had three models of one machine, so I used exactly three PM kits in the span of a year. Wouldn't you know it.....the damn inventory CONTINUED to say I had an extra PM kit and, because I could not account for it, it kept coming up short. Time-and-time again I said, "I have three machines and three PM kits were used...that's it."
So much for a perfect system that was supposed to be flawless; the integrity of the system is only as good as the integrity of the operator(s). The person doing the parts and inventory tallying was way over-his-head with the job.

I would, and still do, keep a minimal amount of things that would be pain-in-the-ass parts to not have on me in an emergency, like thermostats and such. I tried to avoid keeping too much inventory because of the 'integrity' of the back-end control. Some companies feel that if they keep the techs in the field for 27 years that they make more money. Well, it's definitely a balancing act, but I don't think that giving techs 10k in inventory and having 15 people at the shop constantly dicking with the inventory, parts, supplies, etc. works very well.

[Scott_Lewis]

Sounds like the car stock method isn't really popular, either through tech's personal accountability (have to pay for missing stuff), screwed up inventory controls, or just plain keeping track of everything.

I had a 4 year govt contract with almost a 100 machines in only two families. I carried car stock for those. I loved it as I didn't have to make return trips for 95% of those calls. I don't see how I could make that work for the rest of our territory with the something like 60 different families of machines across the two brands we service.

I've put together service kits for each of the families. It is a bit of work to keep the lists up to date with add requests, parts changes via bulletins or no notice changes, and especially the fiasco with the parts numbering at KonicaMinolta. In the long run, I think we save a lot of time with reduced trips. This is especially true when the customer has an 'oh, by the way.........' that they didn't report during the initial call. The parts list in the kit also mentions the nominal pm cycle of the part. That helps with 'do I replace or just clean' decisions without having to look it up. I have a hard time remembering the pm cycles for all the different models!

We are trying out a new method of assigning calls. Currently we just grab the next call in line no matter what the model is. Exceptions would be to prioritize totally 'down' machines over nuisance or copy quality calls. Anyway, we have started to assign families of machines to each of the techs. If this works out well, it could lead to some limited car stock or at least personalized service kits. It is too early to tell if this is going to work as we've only been at this in a limited way for a month or so. We've mixed up the assignments such that everyone gets low and mid range bw and color. Only the production models are limited to select techs.

[Scott_Lewis]

When setting up our new eAutomate system earlier this year, .....

Anyway, when I brought this up to the techs all hell broke loose. They got so pissed at me! Telling me I was going to make their job so much harder for nothing. You know, the typical whining crap. So I said to hell with it. The managers are not going to allow car stock unless there is a way to track it. If the techs don't want to do their part, then they wont get car stock. That simple!

Honestly, that does sound like a fair bit of work to transfer that stock back and forth. Sounds like mucho chances for the data entry to charge off the parts to the wrong warehouse. Possibly a lot more chance of techs being in a hurry to make errors doing the transfers. How easy is it to transfer a part to your own warehouse. Can the login rights limit where you can transfer to/from?

We just finished our inventory for the year. We were only off by a few hundred bucks. Don't want to screw that up with lost parts due to data entry errors or parts from the service tickets deducted from the wrong warehouse.

Would a 'fixed' inventory of car stock work? IOW, create a warehouse of the desired car stock for the tech based upon their needs. Then as they are used, simply replenish just that stuff without going through the transfers. The parts as reported on the service tickets are deducted from the main warehouse. The only time a change or transfer is made would be when the tech makes changes to the list of stuff they carry.

[fixthecopier]

Going back to my industry training, a fixed inventory would be perfect. A tech would have a master list that shows what should be in stock, and every friday you get a list of what the system says you have. Anything that shows up that is not on the master list is probably a mistake that did not get transferred, like that $500 power supply that you used 3 days ago. It will only be as hard as management makes it. If you used 3 separators that are in your stock, then you sign 3 more out.

[Brave Hart]

We run boot stock and find it very help full. Especially in closing calls faster, once a tech comes in for parts he wastes at least 2hours plus. Sorting his parts, chatting to fellow staff or just sit around smoking and drinking coffee.

Each tech has his high mortality parts on him at all times, so he cleans up his calls much quicker. He books out his own stock and controls it by himself, with his PDA he will book out the parts he has used and shoot pass the warehouse and pick up the new parts from his pigeon hole when he gets a free moment.
He pays for whatever is short on the list at month end count so he makes sure his stock is up to date.
He is not allowed at the workshop unless there is a technical meeting, so that means, he will sometimes only come in to workshop once a month.

It works for us now, but it took us along time to get it sorted out.

[kyoceradude]

Like most of you guys, we use to have a car stock. Like I said, we use to. We have 12 techs, and in the age of analogs each tech had a car stock for each series of machines. Car stock was replenished, based on what they used, so each tech had the same car stock. Enter the picture "The digital age" and the analogs are going by the way of the dinosaur, so car stocks started to become obsolete for us. After turning in the car stocks and starting to control inventory, we ended up with over $40,000 worth of obsolete inventory that I can't even give away. We are switching to e-automate in November, so last week our techs turned in all of their car stock and will only be assigned some high mortality parts, like feed rollers, coronas and the like. Most of the territories we cover are within 20 min of the office, and if the tech is going out of the way to a call they will bring suspected parts with them. Car stocks are nice, but with 12 techs all crossed train, it gets very expensive to carry parts.

[schooltech]

If you can, trying to have machine specialists can help reduce spotty inventory levels. At the last place I was at, where we had about 25 techs, we "sort of" had territories and specialists. In our local office, as we were a satellite office, our territory was huge. In our main office, they had specialists that would work on certain ranges for about 75% of their calls, and it actually worked pretty well. One of the downsides of it is when customers would call with down machines and only the specialist knew enough to go make it work. Sometimes, they were in more demand than they could keep up with.

Software can help keep those real-time inventories more accurate. I doubt any company would have a 100% perfect system, as too many hands in the cookie jar add to the variables of inconsistency.

When you have techs that work on everything in the field at any given time, inventory issues will pop up.

So, I would say that machine specialists and quality real-time inventory software can help with the inventory issues. The unfortunate thing is that there are too many variables from each dealer and location that has to be tweaked to make it work, and industry consistency can be difficult. Another thing I can add is to try to keep inventory car stock levels minimal. I wouldn't want to be responsible for 10k in inventory!!!

[msaeger]

I would guess not having a car stock is popular with smaller independent places maybe ? I have worked at Ikon and Ricoh and both places use car stocks. I know a large Ricoh dealer here uses them and I know Xerox does too. They want you doing calls not getting parts. I have some big accounts I have parts at and I keep some in my car.

[Kopyrtek]

We have a large territory and it requires that we have car stock.Way too many miles to cover and not carry some stock.Nobody carries more than about $2500 in stock.We stock the usual feed rollers,hot rollers,df kits and pm kits.We try and cover the basics of most calls.

[JVergin]

Our company consists of two techs (including me as a tech and IT rep) covering all of Omaha and the surrounding cities withing about a 60 mile radius. We work on the following: Panasonic and Savin Copiers, Duplo folders, and Riso duplicators and collators. I have an 02 Taurus (my personal car as I haven't received my company car yet) it has a pretty big trunk which is completely filled with carstock. If I have PMs to do I usually also have my back seat filled with PM kits as well. I keep what I believe I need in my car stock. As I use it I mark what I used and the QTY on the outside of the container I took the part from. When I get back to the office I restock. I keep things like fusing rollers, feed rollers, sep pads, clutches, mylars, drums, developer, a few small PM kits, PCUs, and many other items in my car stock. Just things that I believe are commonly replaced, and things I would like to have just in case. Once a month I set aside some time to go through my car stock to see if there's anything I forgot to restock.

[mjarbar]