“Tales of a Scorched Coffee Pot” — Chapter 83

One of the central complaints right out of the gate is that the inventory is wrong. His explanation is what would seem on the surface a thoroughly obvious one: of course it is. We didn’t take a starting inventory before launching Slingshot. That wasn’t my call, but in the end it’s not going to make a ton of difference anyway. This is why we’re telling you to take a four foot section at a time, count and adjust the inventory within it, then move on to the next. For the unconvinced, however, which even a conservative estimate would probably peg at 80%, this explanation is met with a response that, while varied (disbelief, befuddlement, exasperation) all pretty much amount to the same thing, and makes the rest of them wonder if these people have ever worked in this industry before.

There are other pieces remaining to snap in place, too, though this is no reason to hold up the inventory taking aspect. One of these, which Glenda, Edgar and Reece are excited about, which everyone else who works with these numbers should be, also, whether they know it or not, is that the Slingshot program integrates fully with Great Plains. All that is needed is for Felix to make this connection happen. He says he is working on it, and when that goes live, they will no longer need to break down and code their invoices by department, because these numbers will automatically get dumped into Glenda’s end over at the Bellwether HQ. In the meantime, however, things are still much easier than they used to be — or make that, things could be much easier than they used to be — in that the employees no longer need to tally up invoices themselves. The departmental breakdown is shown within Slingshot, for every invoice, they just need to flip over a few tabs from the one the receiver uses for checking things in, everything is shown right there. Of course, these suggestions are often met with about the same enthusiasm as the ones about copying and pasting, which means you’re still dealing with wacky math and incorrect splits from those who refuse to play ball.

On Edgar’s end, now that the database is uploaded and in mostly accurate shape, his greatest concern is getting companies added for automated ordering. No longer will they need to call, email, or walk around toting clipboards and notebooks to manually jot down their orders. A couple of vendors did have online portals for entering information, although this Slingshot scan gun is far easier than that, even.

The most complex situation involves companies that have an actual true EDI system in place (electronic data interchange) so that both sides can communicate with one another. However, out of over 200 suppliers that Healthy Shopper Market is using, only 12 have this capability. For these, he has basically just reached out to the supplier in question, given their account numbers to Slingshot, as those two parties worked out the kinks on this connection. Even if taking those 12 suppliers and multiplying them by anywhere from four to a dozen account numbers (depending upon such things as whether the store has a deli account, whether anyone even uses this supplier at that store, or whether, say, the bulk manager has always just added to a grocery order, instead of creating his own account, et cetera), this is still a mighty small percentage of their overall accounts.

The vast majority are much easier to set up, and are something Edgar can knock out on his own. These look the same, and function the same, to anyone else. But for the non-EDI vendors, all he actually needs is a destination email address. When the orders are sent, they are fired off as email attachments instead, which show the correct store right in the purchase order itself. Among the first he creates in this fashion, actually, is for Bellwether Snacks, entering Tracy’s email address as the destination. Tracy herself seems not too pleased initially to receive them in this manner, although it’s hard to complain about such when the company’s owner is the one who initiated and paid for this program. And anyway after she settles down a little bit, she too can see that they are easier to deal with, with much fewer errors, and cutting down on who knows how much time and effort — assuming the bulk managers do what they’re supposed to, that is — in the form of no longer fielding a bunch of phone calls and typed-into-the-body style email orders. The Bellwether Snacks example is also a useful one for helping people visualize how this works, especially as ammunition against the holdouts still bellyaching about this process, some of which insist it “doesn’t work” or even will “never work.”

“You were emailing Tracy your orders before, right?”

“Yeah…”

“Well, now you don’t have to. Hit the send button, and it automatically shoots her an email with your order.”

“Really?”

The inventory struggles are another matter entirely, however. Again it seems about a 50/50 split between people who understand what’s going on, and those who do not. The difference here however is that the confused, or the unwilling (or the playing dumb yet willfully sabotaging things, of which there are surely a few), have the ability to wreak much greater havoc. The ones who might be termed Team Ralph Hedges continually lodge a few basic complaints, committing their obscure left field examples to memory so they can hereby prove this inventory will never be perfect, therefore they trust none of these new processes. These continually set off endless loops of arguments that are never won regarding the naysayers. Ralph is at least smart enough to get that the starting inventory was never taken, therefore yes the starting inventory could not possibly be correct. Others fail to grasp even this basic point. Either way, though, the answer is the same: scan a four section, piece by piece, entering the quantities. Commit. Move onto the next four foot section. If you’re really paranoid, you could even do it shelf by shelf within the four foot section. Before you bring out any backstock from your backstock room, you’ll have to add that as well. Once this system is in place, it’s going to be highly accurate, and a whole lot easier to maintain.

But what if the receiver just checked something in, and it’s still sitting on the back dock, huh, huh? Also, look, here’s this one shampoo I found that’s in the system as a case pack of six, but it comes as a single! And how are we supposed to know if someone already scanned a section or not before we bring out any backstock?

“I appreciate you running interference for these Slingshot people, I do,” Ralph croaks to Edgar, after airing variations of the above complaints for the umpteenth time, “but I just don’t trust any of this! Sorry, but I don’t. I just don’t.”

“Well…I mean…the case pack size stuff, that really doesn’t have anything to do with Slingshot. That’s on me to find, and correct. And of course if you guys stumble across any, you can send me those, too. Or like that one electrolite drink packet that’s listed as a 30 count one month, a single the next month…”

“Yeah,” Ralph cackles, nodding and then shaking his head a few times each, eyes gleaming behind his thin, sawed off reading glasses, as though this confirms exactly what he’s talking about.

“…I mean, I did contact the vendor about correcting that, but if not, we’ll just have to watch out for stuff like that. But either way…that has nothing to do with Slingshot, really.”

“Yes, well, I understand all that. But somebody’s gonna have to get them over here and prove to me that this works, before I go committing a bunch of man hours to these types of projects. I’m sorry, but that’s just the way it is!”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Edgar shrugs, “they want everyone on board with this. And I think it will be better — actually it already is better — than what we were doing before. Like as far as your other questions, you guys are just gonna have to come up with a system, and stay organized. I mean, nobody’s gonna know your own department better than you do. If it were me, you know, you guys don’t even have a receiver here at this store. So I would just have someone in vitamins checking in your deliveries if at all possible…”

“Oh, we do, trust me. We do,” Ralph says, eyebrows shooting upward to emphasize this point.

“Well then, there you go. It should be pretty easy to figure out where you’re at, then.”

Ralph laughs and says, “I see,” shakes his head in the manner of someone who would really like to add, “wow, that’s a good one.”

This stuff just really isn’t all that complicated. Is it perfect? No, of course not. Will it take multiple passes to get things just about dialed in? Most likely. Yet it’s hard to escape the conclusion that these otherwise bright people, for the most part, really just don’t want to mess with this newfangled inventory concept, and this is the actual major stumbling block, just about the only stumbling block. That Ray guy up in Boone said don’t let perfect be the enemy of good, but Edgar would phrase it more as, this is already better than what we were doing before; we’re not going to stop doing it because you think there might theoretically be something even better out there in the universe.

Most of the other stores and departments are just hanging a small colored flag or sticker or scrap of paper, to designate that this four foot section has been counted. The observant shopper might notice other companies often do the same, too, even when they already have entrenched systems that have been in place for years. There are also other ramifications of Ralph dragging his feet, additional reasons why he might wish to get his crew in gear, among these being the shelf tag onslaught.

With a couple of months now under their feet, they have sales history and inventory action galore under Slingshot. Therefore when it comes to massive tag updates, Edgar is able to drop sales history into his Excel sheet, drop inventory into Excel, and then only print the tags that show at least some activity in one field or the other, for every department, for every store. Basically anything that isn’t a zero in both fields get printed. The only exception remains again Ralph Hedges, who insists he wants every single vitamins/HBA update tag printed out at Arcadia. While, yes, there’s always the off chance that a handful of fluke scenarios might cause an item to slip past the goalie, virtually everyone else agrees that this is far better than sorting through thousands of items that they don’t even carry. When Edgar explains his method to Ralph, though, the response is pretty much as expected.

“Well, I wouldn’t trust that!” the seasoned vitamin manager with the “tech” background scoffs. And Edgar might be mistaken, but he’s pretty much certain this is verbatim the same phrase Ralph used when Edgar explained, many moons ago, his method for using formulas to determine changes in the Universal Foods catalog, almost instantly, from one month to the next.

“Well I trust it a lot more than a human comparing 20,000 items line by line. Are you kidding me?” Edgar had replied then. This time around, he doesn’t even waste his breath.