0110. Exploring the Impact of Inventory Control on Business Performance.

- Uncover the potential of inventory management for business success.
- Dive into laboratory inventory and budget management intricacies.
- Learn the art of categorizing items in databases and tracking consumable usage.
- Explore unique inventory challenges in manufacturing, including traceability and equipment reliability.
- Discover smarter solutions reshaping inventory management, from technology integration to proactive planning.
- Transform your operations with effective inventory management skills, tools, and communication.
- Prepare to revolutionize your approach to inventory management for guaranteed results.

http://tiny.cc/InventoryOpsFailure

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Transcript

Lawrence Wong: 0:00

The descriptions of these items are tubing set and they usually list the dimensions of whatever it is. That's not helpful. You need to tell me what unit operation this is used for and where I'm going to install it, because otherwise nobody can tell. This is like three-quarter inch by two feet and it's like that's not helpful.

Oscar Gonzalez: 0:20

Welcome to Lean by Design Podcast. I'm your host, Oscar Gonzalez, alongside my co-host Lawrence Wong. We are former MBA classmates turned business partners, with over 25 years of combined experience in life sciences, from R&D through manufacturing. Our experiences have shed light into the complex, ever-changing challenges experienced by this industry and many others. We took a risk quit our six-figure paying jobs in Boston Biotech and Pharma to start Sigma Lab Consulting. Journey with us as we explore the relationship between people and workflow design, the goal To learn, inspire and deliver practical tips to navigate these ever-changing challenges. Stick with us and learn to work smarter, not harder, and be lean by design.

Oscar Gonzalez: 1:12

In today's fast-paced world, effective inventory management stands as the cornerstone of operational efficiency, especially pivotal in the life sciences and manufacturing sectors. Consider a lab technician on the cusp of a pivotal experiment, only to find that a critical supply is run dry. Visualize the exasperation of an inventory manager navigating a lab-rent of websites just to trace a past order. Such real-world scenarios accentuate the necessity of efficient inventory processes. In today's episode, we'll unravel the challenges and strategies around distinguishing critical items from one-offs, the financial implications of inventory decisions, the operational hurdles faced by teams, the psychological stress on inventory personnel and the undeniable importance of seamless communication and alignment Plus.

Oscar Gonzalez: 2:05

Get a glimpse of the future as we explore modern, smarter solutions that are redefining the inventory landscape. Join us as we unpack these topics and delve into the world of inventory management, offering insights and strategies that are bound to revolutionize your approach and help you to become lean by design. And we are back for another episode. I'm your host, oscar Gonzalez. You know, I don't even think that I introduced myself in the last episode, so hopefully people know why I'm doing it now.

Lawrence Wong: 2:40

Yeah, we can insert the.

Oscar Gonzalez: 2:42

Exactly the power of editing. The power of editing, yeah. So I'm here with my friend, business partner, lawrence, and I see this again post that we've done through LinkedIn and we're hoping to elaborate on a lot of these topics that we've been pushing out through social media and making sure that we're delivering the content that makes sense and is relevant to our listeners. And there's a big challenge, I think that comes in manufacturing and facility operations and that's the inventory. So, lawrence, I'm looking back at what you had put together and what you had put out and we're talking about performance of inventory operations. What does that mean in your terms and in your space, inventory operations? Can you elaborate on that?

Lawrence Wong: 3:46

Yeah.

Lawrence Wong: 3:46

So there's kind of two, I would say, areas One is the consumables and items that you might use for supporting manufacturing activities and the other part of it is your spare parts that you have for servicing any of the equipment and instruments that you have in your facility.

Lawrence Wong: 4:03

So the post that I had put out is supposed to be relevant to both areas and, depending on the nuances of your operation, there might be certain systems that you use, maybe like an SAP, versus a maintenance management system where the data resides for where you're storing the master data around your inventory, and so, depending on the systems, you might have unique challenges to both. But I think, if we're just speaking about generalities here, there's a couple of, I would say, problems that a lot of these companies have when they're managing inventory. In either situation One stock and order challenges you have concerns with your database and just the management of how the items are stored in the facility, and then the other one is just job management and quality control. So with the stock and order challenges, you have either overstocking, understocking and this long procurement process. So overstocking means you don't have enough money and space, but you keep ordering things and that's really detrimental to your overall bottom line. I've seen that, yeah, and the other end of it is it's like skyscrapers of boxes.

Lawrence Wong: 5:26

Yes, you have items that nobody knows exists, and so you there, order more things that you don't need, and then they end up just collecting dust or they expire in some sense. The other end of it is understocking for activities that you have planned, and now you cannot do those things because you did not order ahead of time and stock appropriately, and both of those issues are somewhat related to the procurement process too.

Lawrence Wong: 5:53

So if you do need to restock some item that you already have in-house or you're trying to order something new, the procurement process usually involves somebody filling out a form and then somebody has to approve it. If it's over a certain dollar amount, it goes to upper management and they'll have to take a look at it and then approve it. So oftentimes the internal process is very convoluted and complicated and certain approvers are not involved, and so the quantities that you end up ordering aren't vetted through. And then the other end of it is the longer that you take to actually place the order. That lead time that you got on that initial quote just keeps getting larger, and sometimes it gets smaller. But in past years, because of COVID and what we call supply chain issues, that lead time usually extends because the companies are fulfilling orders for other customers Right.

Oscar Gonzalez: 6:51

Right, so we're, you know. It's funny because this reminds me a little bit of somewhere that I used to work, where I was working in the lab. This was an academic institution years ago where we just continued to purchase and we are very frugal about the money spent. Now what happens in academic research is sort of like if you're not spending the money that you said that you needed to run your excuse me to run your experiments for that grant in the research space, when you have grants that are federally funded or funded through organizations, usually you have to provide some level of an update financially and scientifically.

Oscar Gonzalez: 7:36

And I remember one incident where we had four weeks left in the fiscal year and I received a mandate or, I guess, a task from my boss to say, hey, I need you to spend $100,000 and make sure it arrives in the next four weeks, but it had to be on consumables, are you serious?

Oscar Gonzalez: 8:06

So we ended up with stacked boxes that almost went to the ceiling of filters, culture, media, which is light, sensitive, just a number of things. And it was again a lack of knowing the inventory, knowing our budget, knowing where we needed to go. Now you usually don't see that kind of issue in, I would imagine in manufacturing facilities, of lacking, having to spend a certain amount of money by a certain time. But I've seen those towers of supplies and I also see folks that go into that workspace and say I don't know, that was here before I got here. Like what do you say to? Kind of that, because I know these things don't just start by themselves. And sometimes you join in an organization and you look at their inventory and you go what is all this stuff? And everyone, scientists included, shrug their shoulders.

Lawrence Wong: 9:08

Yeah so this kind of goes into that second topic or focus here, which is the database and the storage concerns. So we all do not work in places the size of Costco, so it doesn't make sense for people to order copious amounts of materials to just store them in a place that you'll never use. So I think one of the things that a lot of people don't do is having physical counts of whatever you have on hand, so that you prevent other people from ordering extra things, because people order things because they don't know that you have them in-house, right? People don't show up to work and order things just because they want to. It's usually because they need it for something and it comes from a good place. But to prevent that, you need to have these routine checks of what you have in-house, and the analogy I would use is you don't go to the grocery store without understanding what is in your refrigerator. So you need to have an understanding of what you have in-house and how those things support your upcoming activities. I have, by the way.

Oscar Gonzalez: 10:13

I have done that and it's a disaster.

Lawrence Wong: 10:15

Right, you binge buy and you buy a bunch of random stuff that you don't actually need. So that's one thing, right, doing the physical counts, and the other thing I would say is the data that you are managing within your database also has to be searchable. So I've seen databases where you might do the physical inspections and you might have an accurate count, but nobody can find the thing that they need because the descriptions are all off. There's not enough nuance to what exactly the item is. Most databases don't have a picture of the actual item, so you think it's one thing, but then you show up and it's another thing, and then they go. Well, I guess we don't have it. And then now you have to order something else, and then you have these mismatches of description.

Oscar Gonzalez: 10:59

You're not gonna return. You're not gonna return those other things.

Lawrence Wong: 11:02

You're not gonna return those other things because, like you said, somebody says that was here before I got here, and so they're not gonna go through the effort of removing those things because it's taking up space and nobody actually uses them.

Lawrence Wong: 11:16

So there's gotta be a lot of effort around when you set up your stock room to have a format for how you're gonna name things so that the people that search for them know what it is. And then it's really great to just have a spot where you can actually have the labels, any sort of information about the SKU, or maybe the website, just something where somebody can click on and go okay, that's exactly what I want. In most cases, it's the person who's inputting the data deciding what they think is appropriate, but 99% of the time the person who's putting in the data is not the person using the item, and so it's very useless for the user to look at the description and go what is this? And so that creates this definitely avoidable stress that you can have and creates that riff between your inventory team and either your scientists, your technicians or your mechanics.

Oscar Gonzalez: 12:13

There's a lot of challenges in inventory, and I think not only just in inventory, but in databases in general, and you're really you're touching on that, which is sort of nomenclature. A lot of what I do from working with Project and Project Support is I'm gonna create consistent nomenclature across everything. If you adopt it, great. If you don't change everything together at the same time, because what you're seeing is that you'll have inventory and the search terms may have misspelling. That's a common thing, that there's a letter left off and so it doesn't show up on your search terms and you don't think it's there. And it's actually there. Somebody just spelled it incorrectly or they left a vowel or something like that. Other places they will. What part of the description are they gonna put the SKU number? Do you look at the manufacturer SKU or do you look at the SKU from where you're ordering? And I think that sometimes you'll find that there are two different things and in some cases where we don't wanna purchase this from this place, we wanna purchase it from somewhere else, that manufacturing SKU is gonna be critical to making sure that you're aligning one-to-one On a much smaller scale.

Oscar Gonzalez: 13:32

I have felt a lot of what you're describing in laboratory management. So, being a lab manager, when I started off my career, I started to notice that there were logs of inventory products, of products that we have, whether they were for cell culture or for bench top experiments and the like, but there were so many versions of the same thing. We just continued to buy a case for this, three cases for that, two cases for that, and it may just be for initial experimental stuff, like we wanna see if this works. And so what happens? Oh, that didn't work, let's go to something else. And so now you have a case here of plates that are treated with whatever, now just taking up space in your inventory, and it's valuable.

Oscar Gonzalez: 14:23

Sometimes you have these things and I'm imagining the cost of inventory items for manufacturing and facilities is gonna be much more expensive, especially there's heavy equipment there. But you're talking, hey, each of those cases, yeah, that's 500 bucks, so there's 25 in here. Awesome, that's a couple of thousand dollars. It now is just sitting, just sitting there. And what's one of the main issues with trying to develop and trying to do research? Oh, we don't have the money. We don't have the money you do. It's sitting over there in that closet with all those things that you guys don't even touch. It's crazy.

Lawrence Wong: 15:04

Yeah, I think you know two points here. One is is the descriptions that you mentioned. So as a rule of thumb, you know there there is the Catalog number and then there's usually some vendor part number or whatever. Yeah, even if you don't use the either one to do your primary search, you should extract the information from the label and put it somewhere so that somebody else can search for it. I think the other thing is is to have the description of whatever the vendor calls it, but have a description for what your own people call it, because that's usually Something that they know is much more helpful. So, as an example, a lot of single-use manufacturing facilities have a lot of tubing sets, and so the descriptions of these items are tubing set and they usually list the dimensions of whatever it is. That's not helpful. You need to tell me what unit operation this is used for and like where I'm going to install it, because I otherwise, like nobody can tell.

Oscar Gonzalez: 15:59

You know, this is like three-quarter inch by you don't know what a four yeah, a four centimeter by 18 centimeter. You don't know exactly what that goes to.

Lawrence Wong: 16:09

Yeah, that's it. So you know there's. There's that, having a easy to understand description. And then these databases just need to have a picture of the thing so that somebody can pull up and go yes, that's the thing they need. And Then to your second point about People, you know, spending way too much money on there on their budget and not understanding how they don't have enough money for other things. Well, there it is. Take a look at your budget for your area and what amount of money is being spent on consumables. And if you want to spend money on other things, well then you should reduce money spent on consumables. And the way to do that is understand you know what things did I buy that I do not use. Get rid of it and you can allocate the money for other areas in your function.

Oscar Gonzalez: 16:59

I mean in my function. My function is my household. I can look at my pantry and go okay, there's a lot of stuff in here that we bought either on purpose or on accident. We came home one time with a can of I don't know. It was like it was like something in red clam sauce. We thought it was like pasta and we just like grabbed in and we laughed. I can't remember. This was years ago. That Existed in my pantry, I think, for probably like 18 months, until we're like okay, let's just I don't know drop this off at a shelter. It was fine, we just had no use for it and it somehow magically appeared because we purchased on accident. Now Are we gonna drive, you know, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, to the grocery store to return two small cans that were 80 cents a piece? Probably not, but you know it's. It's the things that you're describing. I was feel like I should have an inventory for my, for my pantry as well, and in refrigerator.

Lawrence Wong: 17:57

Yeah, and it you know back to the database that you should have some sort of traceability around the last time you used it and what the transaction data looks like, because that way you can tell, like, okay, within a month or you know A year, this is how much I used of this particular skew, and then you can stock accordingly to that. And then the other thing you should really do is have, I would say, categories for your consumables and items so that you can trend. Yes, you know, for, let's say, I have a bunch of containers that I buy. Okay, well, what size container is most used often and what vendor do we prefer with the other ones? You can start to do this analysis, you know.

Oscar Gonzalez: 18:38

I think you hit something that we don't see enough of is categorization of inventory of activities, of tasks, of there's so many things that we need to maintain databases for, and we try to become so specific that when we do not categorize it to some extent it makes it harder to find what we're looking for and I think what you're. You know, if I can take what your example is for a minute and put it into, you know, the research space Categorize, you know, is this tissue culture? Is this, you know, for in vivo work, for animal work? Is this for stuff on your desktop that doesn't really require, you know, require some aseptic technique but doesn't really require you to be in a biosafety cabinet? You know, is this, is this just for chemicals? You know, so that when you go back to search you could say I Got a look for this, but I got a look for this, that's, I got a look for this particular item that I can use in a biosafety cabinet. If I buy this other one. That's something that I use on the bench top and usually there are differences and there's gonna be different, the prices are gonna be different for those things. So it's, it's smart, you know. I think you're describing.

Oscar Gonzalez: 19:58

A lot of this is is really just Understanding your budget and where your money is coming from and the amount of space that you're spending to retain things you know and, and this all kind of Goes back into that, that motion of the, or goes back into the flow of the, the, the supply chain and and the lead times and making sure that you're making appropriate orders. I know sometimes we go, oh we're, you know, we think we're gonna be doing this for a long time without having really the data for it. So let's order a bunch and then you order a bulk of it and you only use 10%. So what do you? What do you do with it Then? What do you do with it Then, when you realize you've already over estimated, you're listening to lean by design podcast and we'll be right back after a quick break.

Oscar Gonzalez: 20:50

Do you suspect your life sciences company could do things more efficiently? Maybe you're seeing costly workflow issues or maybe the work feels more difficult to perform than necessary, affecting team morale. If any of this resonates, reach out to the team at Sigma lab consulting for a free consultation on how we can develop and launch a Custom solution fit for your team. Our consultants will build a custom workflow solution for your team to reach peak efficiency. Find out more at wwwSigmaLabConsultingcom.

Lawrence Wong: 21:24

Places will not allow you to return things just because they don't know whatever you've done to the actual item. Some of those things might come in certain packs or quantities so that you won't take it back. Something like chemicals and things like that they're not gonna take back, but it depends. So I would suggest reaching out to other labs and people in your network to see if they can repurpose that for anything that they're doing in their space and Then, to that point you know, having traceability on what you're using the items for In your experiment, or even to the lab level to understand, like, where the consumption is.

Lawrence Wong: 22:01

That'll help you to forecast better and maybe you don't order as much for some of those activities going on in that lab. I've seen, especially in lab areas where you have these like satellite storage spaces where you just stock them to whatever you know amount is Available in that space and then they just restock the area but there's no tracking of hey, this particular lab is using a ridiculous amount of pipettes or whatever and To kind of track where the spending is, because not all functional areas will be using the same amount of items. You have some areas that might be using.

Oscar Gonzalez: 22:41

So it's folks just walking in. It's just folks walking in like I need this, I need this, I need this, but there's no traceability as to who are the people that are actually depleting these items.

Lawrence Wong: 22:51

So in that case the the budget for your consumables for the building should really be some sort of like step down analysis right when you understand, like, what labs are in this building and then what percentage of the budget is being consumed by each of these labs. Because the worst thing is you have a lab that doesn't use you any consumables at all and then they get charged for another lab using something and they're like well, why am I paying for this if I'm not even using any of those materials? And so that I think that's more common in, like a lab space. On the manufacturing side there's a lot of traceability. So every time that you scan an item to a batch record, it has to record the specific item that you use for that batch, because we have to understand this is the exact item intended for this process. So you're not gonna have those issues there.

Lawrence Wong: 23:43

I think issues you have in manufacturing are that Sometimes people might scan the wrong thing and now you kind of have to reconcile like, oh, did you actually use that or did you use this? And then you kind of have to move that item, return it back, and Doing those exchanges takes a lot of time from the actual Team that's on the floor trying to get their work done, because now they have to go. I'll have to return this back into storage because we were issued the wrong thing. And again it goes back to Understanding what is the process that you're running and how many of those things we actually need. This happens all the time in maintenance because Sometimes you might drop a gasket or an O-ring and you need an extra one. So they'll issue maybe like maybe five to ten percent more than what you actually need, just in case, and then they make the transactions easy. So you bring back a, a kit, and you say these are the items I didn't use and you put them back into storage.

Lawrence Wong: 24:43

Not as easy like a check-in check out so not so easy in manufacturing, just because a lot of these things they come in plastics and once you kind of tear it apart you can't really store it back in the original location.

Oscar Gonzalez: 24:55

It's already open.

Lawrence Wong: 24:56

Yeah right, you're not gonna get one O-ring, you're gonna get a pack with four or you might get like a like a tubing set With a bunch of clamps and things like that that. Oh well, I only use like five of it and well, you can't return the rest of it because you have to put it back in the original container.

Oscar Gonzalez: 25:13

Right, right. So it's definitely you know, and I think, what you're describing and in many cases there are other parts of the organization that could potentially use those consumable. So if you have this sort of structure that's overarching all these different Material procurement spaces, you can at least say like, oh, there's not one, you know. Oh, we don't have one here, but the third floor has four or something. Maybe I can check out and get billed for whatever percentage of that that I used, something like that.

Lawrence Wong: 25:45

So, yeah, I think, when you're if, for those people out there that are in situations where you have an established inventory operation setup and you're either manufacturing or a lab space, a good way to start is just by collecting the feedback from the teams, and That'll generally point you in the right direction of where you should start to kind of look at things and Identify any pain points that you want to focus on to improve. Assuming that you don't have data now, if you have data, you can kind of look at the transactions and and Understand again where is the money going right? Follow the dollars and look at what items are we buying one off versus things that we use a lot, and just make sure that you're stocking appropriately to those levels and then look at you know what activities have occurred in the past and what you plan on doing in the next couple of months, so that it gives your your team enough time to order things and to stock the appropriate items. Now, on the flip side, if you're setting up something from scratch and you don't have anything set up, I think the most important thing to do is to do it in an assessment of what items you need to stock, because don't stock everything under the Sun, because you don't have enough money in space again. Really, take a take a hard look at what are those items that you're cool, you're absolutely going to use, and make sure you have enough of those to sustain you for whatever time period you decide. Now, right, you know.

Lawrence Wong: 27:14

There, I think, on the equipment side, it's a little bit more. I think the risk is, hey, if this Whatever pump or something breaks and I don't have this item for it, I might not be able to sustain my operation. Okay, well, we're not going to buy an entire facility and put in a stock room, right? What is the probability of that happening, right? I think using the, the understanding of a failure rates and what things might go wrong and Establishing a probability over them allows you to stock the right items. If you're blindly going in there and buying everything in the manual, you're just wasting a lot of money and you're buying things that you might not use.

Oscar Gonzalez: 27:55

Yeah, you're gonna buy something that has like a life cycle of like five years. Why do you need that sitting, you know, and and by then Technology may have advanced, they may have a new product in five years.

Lawrence Wong: 28:07

I've seen in places where people will stock, like, a spare motor and they'll leave it on the shelf and It'll be there for five years, and then they they try to install it and they go, oh, it doesn't work. And it's like, well, when you store a motor on an empty shelf, you have to be wary of the vibration that is in the building because it impacts the internal bearings, and if those internal bearings are messed up, it won't be rotating the right way. And so you know what's the point of talking that. And it was because, oh, somebody said that they thought it might break in the next year. And it's like, well, if you're buying something that is gonna break in the first year, then okay.

Lawrence Wong: 28:42

There's a lot of problems here. One is you even know how I was and don't buy that, please, right? So you know being able to stock the things that that won't expire by the time you use them or, you know, become Not functioning. I think the other thing is don't stock things that nobody can use. I've seen places where people will buy replacement parts and then the technicians go I don't even know how to replace this, like, why did we buy this? And it makes no sense, right?

Lawrence Wong: 29:11

and and you have the stockpile of Items that nobody knows how to to use, and then probably for the lab as well. People will buy things that nobody else will use for their experiment and Then you go well, why do we have so many of these things? So you know, having the right checks and balances there to understand you know what are the items that are critical and then what things are kind of one-off items and keep the quantity low, have some sort of way to track the transactions, and how long something's been sitting on the shelf is really key. We'll be right back after a quick break.

Oscar Gonzalez: 29:43

Do you suspect your life sciences company could do things more efficiently? Maybe you're seeing costly workflow issues, or maybe the work feels more difficult to perform than necessary, affecting team around. If any of this resonates, reach out to the team at Sigma lab consulting for a free consultation On how we can develop and launch a custom solution fit for your team. Our consultants will build a custom workflow solution for your team to reach peak efficiency. Find out more at wwwSigmaLabConsultingcom. Can you, can you? You know we're running out of time here, but I want to see if you can estimate in some Layer what this amounts to in terms of We've overstocked or we're wasting time because we don't have things in stock, or we have things that people can't use, or we purchase things. What would you say is probably a fair range for the cost associated with a lot of these challenges that you've pointed out today?

Lawrence Wong: 30:52

The cost of your overall inventory. I would say I'm going to use the 80-20 rule and say 80% of your budget is probably attributed to 20% of the things that you actually have and then, on the flip side, I would say 80% of your time is being spent on 20% of those like key activities within that workflow. For managing the items itself, I think a lot of people struggle with like doing these routine checks and being able to measure okay, what things do I not use anymore? And then going back to remove those things to make more space for the things that you actually need. It is a lot of work to do those physical counts and keep track of the dollars that go along with it, but at the end of the day, that money can be allocated to other things that are much better valued right.

Oscar Gonzalez: 31:48

Value generated.

Lawrence Wong: 31:50

There's other things that you can spend the money on. The last thing you want to tell your management is hey, we bought a bunch of boxes that take up half the lab, that we don't know if they're good anymore, right?

Oscar Gonzalez: 32:03

Or they were purchased before we got here.

Oscar Gonzalez: 32:05

Okay, well, now what do we do? You know, lawrence, I've you've hit on so many things that I have experienced on a smaller scale within a laboratory. But just you know, I think bringing this level of clarity to the overspend, the underspend, the lack of managing the materials that we maintain within our organizations, our laboratories, manufacturing facilities, etc. It's a real challenge, it's a real problem that we need to try to address, because there's, you know, money is only getting tighter and we still need to continue to produce science in new ways and innovative, using innovative technologies, and those require additional, not only just additional headcount, but additional consumables and additional supplies, etc. And so I think we need to have this renewed focus on what are we actually spending and how can we best assess what is necessary? You know, how do we create, dare I say, a lean environment that allows us to be prepared when something goes short, and prepare ourselves to or prevent ourselves from over-ordering topics? So anything, anything else that I missed that you want to add before we say goodbye.

Lawrence Wong: 33:41

One more thing is something that is very difficult to measure and I haven't seen anybody be able to measure. It is the amount of stress that is placed on the inventory operations team when things don't work right, because they're usually stuck in the middle where you have management telling them hey, you need to spend less. And then you have other I would say users that are like we don't have enough of this, so we need to buy more, and you're balancing this.

Oscar Gonzalez: 34:07

I need this yeah.

Lawrence Wong: 34:08

What do you want me to do right? And so there's this stress that gets placed and blame, I would say, on the inventory teams. A lot of times, and a lot of it is, I think it's blame that should be spread around. Right Management should have clear indications of how do we know whether or not we are stocking enough to schedule the experiments that are going on and the operations that are going on. Right, because if you're telling your teams to do a bunch of things and now you have to buy a bunch of material but you're not factoring that into your budget, how does that do anybody good when the scientists are trying to order stuff and the inventory is telling them no, you can't order it because our budget is X right. And so there's now you have this stress right, full situation that definitely could have been avoided if everybody was on the same page.

Oscar Gonzalez: 34:57

Right, I can't agree with you more, lawrence. Thanks again for that discussion, for those points. I think it's super critical and it's going to be really important for folks to hear you know to our listeners. You know, take these things and think about how is your inventory in your space? It could be a laboratory, it could be the manufacturing space, it could be in a certain facility. You know how are you guys managing it and how, what value can you drive toward your organization? You know these are small wins that I think are capable to be delivered by folks that are new in the organization or folks that have been there for a while. You know these are small wins where you can say, hey, I've run this quick analysis and I see that we're only using, you know, 40% of what we're ordering over six months. So you know you can run these analysis in a very controlled space and controlled setting. You know when you have the data and if you don't have the data, start collecting it.

Oscar Gonzalez: 36:02

Think about those individual orders. I think I told you before, lawrence, when I was first working in the industry, I was replacing a lab manager and I was getting order requests on a post-it note and it would just say, like six wall plates. There are like 45 different variations of six wall plates. I said where did you order from? Oh, I don't know. Just start going into all the different, go to these different websites and see where the most recent order was. That's crazy, that's. I mean, how much time am I going to spend, how much am I getting paid, to now search order history on various websites to find out where we last purchased this item? Yeah, let's think about how we use our time a little bit more efficiently.

Lawrence Wong: 36:48

Unfortunately, that is very common in our space and you know, I think the last thing that a scientist or a manufacturing operator or a technician wants is when they're about to do their job and they don't have the materials that they need to do their job.

Oscar Gonzalez: 37:07

Right, right. Well, that's the time that we have for today. So, lawrence, again, I always appreciate our conversations and we hope that all of our listeners get something from this and really can take it back to their organizations and start to rethink about how you manage the work that's going on in your supply chains, in your inventories, in your spaces. Yeah, so, thanks again, and, in the words of my man, lawrence, over here, what's smarter?

Lawrence Wong: 37:44

And if if anybody has a topic that they want us to discuss, please just shoot us a message on LinkedIn or email and we can bring that up as well.

Oscar Gonzalez: 37:55

Yeah, we'd love to hear from you, we'd love to talk about that and we'd love to you know, bring that attention into the space to really drive efficiency in our operations. Thanks again for listening, until next time.

Oscar Gonzalez: 38:17

From our discussion today on inventory management, we looked into the delicate balancing act between overstocking and understocking, which cannot be stressed enough.

Oscar Gonzalez: 38:27

Ensuring that we have the right quantities of essential items while minimizing surplus not only protects the scarce financial resources, but also fosters efficient operations. We also delved into the immense value of proactive planning, which acts as an antidote to many operational disruptions. Moreover, communications and alignment stand out as the backbone of inventory management, bridging gaps between departments and ensuring everyone remains on the same page. We also recognize the underlying psychological strain on inventory personnel, emphasizing the importance of adequate training, support and acknowledgement of their pivotal role. Lastly, in the ever-evolving world of inventory, embracing technology and innovation solutions should be the beacon guiding companies toward operational excellence. A proactive, communicative and technologically adept approach to inventory management is the way forward for all organizations aiming for peak performance and to become lean by design. Thanks for listening. Don't forget to leave us a review, like and share on Spotify, apple and Google Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, and, if you're interested in being on the show or becoming a sponsor, send us a message at Lean by Design at SigmaLabConsultingcom.