Interesting week this week for some reason (stars aligning, who knows) the word sustainability came up a lot this week culminating in a nice meeting with a very cool non-profit. Typically when I hear about sustainability in the supply chain it’s about by-products, or product content, reusable packaging etc… All great for all of us and our planet no doubt, and so it’s a shame that we have to legislate some level of compliance, but that is another rant.My week this week included a meeting with a very nice woman who works at a Non-Profit organization. Their mission is to keep as much building supplies out of land-fills as possible. They send deconstruction crews out to harvest building supplies then they sell these products. Their vision is to be able to sell through an e-commerce site (I knew the Internet was going to catch on) and through a walk-in warehouse. They work with some at-risk people and all in all it was just nice to understand their mission and the operating model they execute. It is a model they would like to replicate.Because they are a non-profit they wanted a Cloud Computing solution because they simply do not have the skill sets and funds to keep an information system up and running. They have 136,000 square feet of inventory but let’s think about the model – everything is reclaimed. There is no common inventory product SKU’s. Everything is different. Traditional inventory or warehouse management systems really don’t like this. They prefer common product SKU’s with standard logistics information. Geez, even all our inventory systems are built to support buying new stuff, warehousing new stuff and then replacing the consumed new stuff with more new stuff.
I’m not really sure how they found us, whether looking for Cloud computing, Inventory Management or e-Commerce order fulfillment, just glad they did.
So what’s the secret to a solution? Think about serial number tracking… tracking a unique unit of one. Yes, so we can manage a set of reclaimed interior french doors with full glass doors in varnished wood. They need to be categorized and cataloged but they are not a standard SKU. When we built our application we deployed a condition code (i.e. New, Used, etc) to help define inventory to support customers that have the same product in stock with the same SKU but different condition codes. Then they could answer a pretty basic question… how much of a certain product did they have in stock by entering one SKU.
We are thinking we can use these in combination to solve the problem – to generate a smart serial number / product ID and share this as a common ID to the rest of the business systems. This is critical, especially when you consider the model…
Sell on the Internet = e-Commerce solution
Walk in Sales (retail) = Point of Sales solution
Customer Management = Customer Relationship Management CRM
Warehouse, Order Management, Procurement = Well that would be us of course
All sharing units of one. All the applications working together in a simple contiguous business model which should be straight forward but it’s not. I’m looking forward to working on this problem.
If you have any ideas or comments I’d love to hear from you. We should help these people with their mission.
-MF
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