What's in stock?

DanHolohan

the Home Depot thread, and the comments about wholesalers - days open, times, stock available - got me thinking about what should be in a contractor's stockroom, or on the truck?

How much should contractors be carrying in inventory nowadays? How much money should be tied up in products?

Your thoughts?

Alan R. Mercurio_3

Dan, when I was the service manager of the first company I worked for in the heating business we had a customer base between 3,000 to 4,000 I maintained about 70K in the stock room and close to 30K in each (5) service vans. The stock room included boilers, furnaces, water heaters and oil tanks. Today those numbers surely would be a bit higher but I would still keep that inventory on the vans maybe a little less in the stock room and of course it would include some of the new products that have become available to us since then.

I’ll gladly share that list of inventory with anyone if you wish I just didn’t want to make this post to long.

Back to packing


Your friend in the industry,
Alan R. Mercurio

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David Sutton_6

i know for me

I do steam, hot water, warm air, but basicly a install co.i try to keep the inventory down to a minimum, a few of each on fittings, controls, for the one that slip thru qualilty control all the small things needed to dress a boiler in the event a few things are back ordered lol Sheets of metal stock to custom fit ducts,extra pipe for boilers ( sometime i think my tape is out of calabration ) flue pipe , hydro cement, choice silicones complete back ups on sweat stuff,nips and valves, a hole lot of nuts and bolt and widgets to put the old ones back on line.oil related products ,nozzles,filters gaskets, strainers pumps circs and the list goes on but the last thing lots of TOOLS real cool tools.....David

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Supply House Rick

A view from the other side of the counter

Service people it's pretty much mandatory that they carry the repair parts for the equipment they sell.

The installer should have extra "A" list items like pipe, valves & fittings. In their truck and shop

We also have the companies who sometimes come to our counter 3 times a day for 3/4" cxc 90's. When asked "would you like a whole bag?" They always reply, "nope, that's all we need." You are only hurting yourself if you don't stock up...

Rick

S Ebels

Agreed

When we go to anything more than a basic changeout, we bring the 8x14 trailer and the Sprinter.

The Sprinter has gobs of misc pieces and parts that you are ALWAYS running around trying to find. Screws, nuts, bolts, sheet metal screws, hangers and strut, electrical devices, wire nuts, various pieces of wire from THHN to romex and underground in 16 through 10 gauge, along with all the normal service parts for the items we sell and service.

The trailer contains a roll around tool chest that holds all of our power tools, bits, chargers, spare batteries, hole saws and power tools etc. If we set up on a multi day/week job this gets rolled into the building. Saves tons of miles on the feet which translates into TIME. There are over 300 bins in the trailer with fittings for pex, steel, pvc and copper. Pex goes to 1 1/4" PVC to 3" Steel to 1 1/2" and copper to 1 1/2" as far as fittings are concerned. The Rems pipe threader with dies from 1/2" to 4" along with the groover are kept in it also. Larger electrical stuff like rolls of wire and boxes are stocked in it too.

Right now the trailer looks like a bomb went off in it because we just finished a job and everything just gets chucked in when we are in a hurry. Regardless of what you use to haul your stuff, it takes maintenance to keep it organized enough to do you any good.

Dave DeFord_4

A view from the other side of the truck

What I would expect from a service truck is anything that would reasonably be needed to service the problem. This would include just about anything between the heat source and the heat emitter. It would also include most control items on the boiler/emitter unless it was unusual. Since I would probably be paying for any trips to the supplier I would not be happy if the truck did not have a common part that was needed for a repair. I would also not be happy if I were told that I was going to pay for an off-hours service call and the parts were not available to complete the job. I know that this is not always possible but it is a worthy goal.

P.S. the guy that can't be bothered to buy a whole bag of fittings is probably the same guy complaining about not making any money and is late paying his bill. He could probably buy 10 fittings for what he pays for the trip to the supplier.

DanHolohan

Dave,

for how many jobs would you stock? How many calls before having to go back for supplies? Thanks.

Unknown

In my old van

I stocked everything and anything to install maybe 4 or 5 boilers , including a steamer or 2 . That's not including the boilers or burners , but everything else .

Now in my new truck I don't stock anything 2 inch or above . I do keep all the same fittings , but alot less of each . It would be a scavenger hunt to install 2 boilers now without replenishing the stock . But it's been almost 2 years and I haven't had to make a trip to the shop or the store in the middle of a job .

It's gotta be saving some amount of gas also without the extra 500 lbs or so of weight .

S Ebels

I should add

The reason we try to bring the whole kit & kaboodle to our installs is two fold.

Number one is that we are in the boonies and many times the closest supply house is 40-50 miles away. Too much time lost running to get that cussed 1/2 x 1/4 bushing or whatever it is I forgot back at the shop.

Number two is the fact that I am probably the worst person on earth as far as planning a job down to the last little piece. Granted, a lot of the things we get into are fairly complex but I still have a problem in that area, period. When I sit down to design a piping layout I'm good at putting the general concept of how everything has to go together and the why and the how. But ask me to figure out how many pieces of this that or the other thing it's going to take and I just go bonkers.All the little variables that are always encountered adapting from one size to another drive me nuts.

Weezbo

Depends on where you are \"Going\"

if it is "Up country" you better be packing the items necessary to Make whatever you need ) and that gets real tool intensive from the applied physics book to the angstrom gages:) drag along a couple connex boxes of materials for good measure you have to roll with Ebels on that one.

Dave DeFord_4

Not sure what your question is..

the number of jobs of the type of jobs? As to the number of calls it would be at least a day, maybe a half a day if you return to the shop for lunch. I'll have more later tonight.

John R. Hall

Mock-up

I visited with a contractor last week who had an exact duplicate of the inside of the company service van in his warehouse. It was designed to show techs where everything went and which parts/equipment were required on each van. Pretty cool stuff.

Dave Yates (PAH)

the three million dollar elephant

We stock more in our warehouse and on the trucks than most shops. Partly because we're a service, repair & rebuild PHVAC service co, but mainly because of the ever-increasing complexity of equipment being manufactured these days. Where a furnace or boiler manufacturer might have had a dozen components we'd need to stock in order to restore heating on a weekend or middle-of-the-night call, that same line today often requires parts esoteric to single models instead of the model series.

Take radiant heating as an example. Our local supply houses don't historically stock a full line of anyone's products. As a result, we have more radiant products in our inventory than most of the supply houses. While Uponor and Watts make up the majority, we have tubing, fittings and manifolds from others too. Then there's the controls, circulators and condensing boiler parts. I could probably pull about 10G worth of obsolete controls and parts off of our shelves. If we paid a no-turn penalty for dusty inventory like supply house branches do, we'd have big penalties! But, we've got customers with equipment that might one day need that fenwall control, so the dust accumulates...

Switch gears and there's the rapid pace of changes within the A/C side. Constant upgrades for recovery equipment, new certifications required, new gauge sets to handle the new refrigerants with their increased pressures and so on.

Imagine you were a mechanical contractor with (in your mind) about ten years to go to retirement & you thought you'd ignore the changes sweeping our industry - thinking you could ride it out. If you waited just five years, the pace of change would see you so far behing the eight-ball, that catching up might not be feasible.

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Shaun Anderson

What about ....

the ones who bring back a return of copper / pvc fittings let over from a job ? I've had guys bring back 1/2" & 3/4" copper 90's then a few days they buy enough for the next job they are on now. And yes they do drive service vans but I hate to wonder whats really stocked in the van. How do you make money always driving to the supply house for items like that ?

Shaun

Unknown

One of my consulting services

is to set up stock inventory for companies that do gas service. I have a list of minimum stock which should be carried in order to service gas heating and hot water. That list is one of our "Troubleshooting Guides" we sell. In addition we establish a process that keeps techs from making frequent stops at the supply house. The basis for our program is to cut down on repeat inventory or buying items just becasue you might need it someday. It is also built around a training program to show how to apply those controls and devices to the actual job. Our manuals also have in addition to troubleshooting procedures, diagrams and operating sequences a control cross reference for each system. This saves carrying a bunch of catalogs. That means that when a tech has found out what is wrong with a control he can in that same manual find a cross reference for the correct replacement part. This all helps to control inventory and save time.

Frank M Alleva

We no longer have an active "warehouse". We utilize one of the restocking programs available from a major wholesaler. There are a few bumps along the way but keeping our techs moving and away from the coffee and donuts has proved benificial. Depending on the level of service our techs provide (oil, gas, A/C etc), our stock value runs between 8K and 12K. Our "emergency stockrooms" try to mirror what is carried on a typical fully stocked single van.

DanHolohan

Perhaps that the solution.

Gem Plumbing in Rhode Island has a branch of Ferguson inside their building. Ferguson stocks all the Gem trucks, and doesn't charge Gem for the products until their sold.

Josh_10

We are going there with our company Tim. I would like to go flat rate with all fo my pricing and guarantee everything in stock 24 hours a day. That is for service. We are keeping 8 different water heaters in stock as well as all service parts.

For our install side we design the system up right off the bat including every radiant loop on the cad and every joint on a home run. Then we purchase EVERY thing for the job up front. It gets bundled up and taken to the job in phases.

I do think we need to carry alot of stock. Can I do it all right now? No. I have only been in business for 6 months. Not to mention you have to pay taxes on your inventory. How about this though if a customer is calling around you can say we can fix it right now, and your tech has everything he could possibly need right in his truck. And he has more billable hours because he isn't running to the supply house.

Here's one for you suppliers though.. My supplier has a pager that goes out with one employee every weekend. If we need a water heater on a sunday at 7AM we just page our supplier and they unlock the door and sell us a water heater. Not a bad way to go.

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Shaun Anderson

That is a service we offer too.

We are also a Rheem conversion center and we will convert and deliver a new water heater after closing hours. We carry a huge inventory of commercial gas / electric water heaters. You can't stock everything on you truck but you can count on supply houses like ours to fill your order. Very rarely do we not have what you need. We have had contractors tell other contractors " If Rampart don't have it no one has it ".

I just had one of my contractors call me on a Saturday night ( 10:00 pm ) while I was watching boxing needing some weld fitting on a high pressure steam / chiller line and I had him page our after hours pager and within 30 minutes had him heading back to the job. Contractor told me they put in over 60 hours total from Friday-Sunday just to get system up by Monday. Without that service they would have not got the system back on line for Monday. Building serves our local FBI / CIA / Dept. of Homeland Sercurity along with the Federal court house.

Shaun

MOOSE_2

I constantly stand in line at the supply house behind guys that return every left over part from installation jobs.

I posted a thread at OTT about Normally Stocked Parts for oil service. Many guys in the business don't want to carry an inventory, and make their money on labor running for coffee, uh... I mean parts.

Supply House Rick

Shaun

This happens all the time. Being a former manager of a Plumbing & Heating Company I understand that it keeps billing straight on jobs. BUT it sure is a pain for suppliers to handle 50 cent items twice sometimes three times. Nature of the beast. We accept it and move on...


Rick

Shaun Anderson

Rick

Some guys have what it takes and some guys don't. Like you said, just have accept it and move on.

Shaun