When we challenged integrators to submit pictures of the oldest piece of gear on their inventory shelves for our Oldest Gear Contest, we couldn’t have expected the oldest product to be straight out of the 1970s. Yet, the fact that our first ever Oldest Gear winner said he probably has OLDER stuff lying around somewhere speaks to an issue in the custom integration industry: inventory management.

Yes, we’re going to use this as an excuse to talk about a not-so-appealing topic…but before we do, let’s take a moment to marvel at our winner!

Tom Loveitt, Design/Sales, Canfield Systems, submitted what is surely the oldest piece of gear during this round of these awards. He says it’s been sitting on Canfield’s shelves since well before he was with the company.

“The best that I can figure is this product was one of Telex‘s early forays into assistive listening. These days, we do assistive listening systems either with RF distribution or infrared distribution. This was, of course, none of those — and is inviting folks to strap these clamshells onto their head and plug the feed cable into an existing outlet. It’s more like a set of headphones than anything else. I have never seen it installed anywhere.”

But, Loveitt says, I’ve noticed it on the shelf since I came to work with this company in the early 90s.

CE Pro: This isn’t the only piece of gear that you’ve said has sat on your shelves for a while. What do you do with other old gear when you upgrade clients?

Tom Loveitt: Our decision that was made many years ago is that the best customer is a repeat customer — we try everything we can to make people think of us first. Sometimes it’s as simple as being able to say, yes, when someone calls and tells us that the local softball team would like to put up a couple of speakers and needs a microphone. And is there anything that we could sell them, and by the way, their budget is approximately zero.

Now to that end, we have an embarrassing array of used equipment that we’ve removed from installations that may be 20-year-old technology, and maybe 30-year-old technology. But it’s good technology.

And the brands that we have sold over the years, are certainly able to with minor upkeep is still valid after that period of time. So we have a lot of stuff that is cluttering up various corners of our warehouse. And sometimes we remember it’s there. And sometimes we don’t. There’s some stuff down there that I’m always surprised to find that I probably put there.

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Better Inventory Management for Custom Integrators: Is it Possible?

James Foxall, CEO of TigerPaw Software, says that inventory management problems don’t have to be so serious for most integration companies, regardless of their size.

“It’s critical from a cost perspective and a time perspective — buying something that you never sell is a problem, and buying something that you’ve already got is also a problem.

“But you also have time issues when you need to fulfill an order or an install for a client, and you’re waiting on an item that because you don’t have it in stock, because you don’t have a smart enough system to anticipate that. Or maybe you thought you had one and it’s gone, whether that was from shrinkage, or you used it on a job.”

CE Pro: How much inventory do you think dealers should carry at any given time?

James Foxall: Just in time is a viable option for a lot of items, but not everything. There are those items that you know when they fail at a customer location, you need to have one available. It’s going to be unacceptable to tell your client you know High Net Worth client that, you know, it’s gonna take me three weeks to replace that thing.

My feeling is not so much the dollar amounts, it’s a blend of what can I get easily, quickly, and cheaply. And what are the items that are much more important and much more critical that when I’m ready to go, and I got a client who wants to give me money? I can’t wait three or four weeks for that I sell regularly.

CE Pro: What are the biggest mistakes you see integrators make when managing their inventory?

James Foxall: There’s really four questions that integrators need to be able to answer, and if they can answer these, then we can talk about all the mistakes of ‘why’.

One is what do I have? It’s amazing how many people don’t know what they have, if they’re not managing their inventory.

The other is, where is it? You know, is it is it on Bob’s bench? Is it in my warehouse? Is it in Ted’s truck?

The third one is, what did I pay for it? You know that’s really important from a job costing perspective.

Lastly, how much is it worth today?

Honestly, if you’re using TigerPaw, you can answer the questions every day. And you can actually reconcile your inventory within a penny every day.

One of the things you really want to avoid is part swaps, right, rolling a truck out to a client only to find out you’re missing a piece on that truck. That is a really timely costly mistake because it requires another human being now just stop what they’re doing and meet you or you’ve got to go all the way back.

The maximums are also important too, because we talked about you don’t want to raise your cost by ordering a bunch of things you don’t need, right? And that’s why we say to everybody that does inventory that costs should be adjusted to the account that it came in. If it’s serialized, that serial number should come in, and then you track that all the way through the lifecycle. So maybe it comes into a certain bin in a warehouse, and then it goes on to a certain technician’s vehicle. And then when it gets sold, it should go into the customer’s inventory. So we have a full history of everything the customer ever paid for.

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