Modern Approaches To Hybrid Stocking

Modern Approaches to Hybrid Stocking

The last two years have drastically changed the way businesses today need to plan for potential disruptions to how they create, sell, and distribute their products. Supply chain issues, shifting trends within the market, and changing customer requirements are just a few of the factors that must be monitored in order to keep products moving out the door. These factors have brought the concept of hybrid stocking to the fore in our day-to-day operations.

Many companies are feeling abandoned by their manufacturers as they have started to limit who can leverage certain approaches or tactics designed to help them navigate supply chain, purchasing, production, and inventory management issues caused by the pandemic. In times like these, it’s critical to have a good partnership with your manufacturer to ensure that you’re taking advantage of all of the tools at your disposal to minimize any disruption.

Hybrid Stocking Benefits: Options for Everyone, Regardless of Size

Here at Integrated Manufacturing Solutions, we strive to offer all of our customers flexibility in the way they manufacture in order to reduce the effects of the pandemic on their business. This can include offering different types of orders such as job shops, contracts, or outsourcing to make sure our customers are confident that their products will be delivered on time, at the lowest cost, and with the least amount of disruption possible.

Many manufacturers only offer certain types of flexibility to their biggest customers and will have specific minimums that need to be met in order to take advantage of certain cost saving measures. Smaller businesses or customers with smaller-scale projects are unable to leverage all of the options available to them simply based upon how much money they’re spending. This leaves them out in the cold, fighting to secure materials and get their products created and delivered in time to meet consumer demand.

Our goal is to ensure all of our customers have all available tools at their disposal to ensure they’re getting the most for their money when they work with us. This means we don’t set minimums to take advantage of any of our cost savings measures. This also means we take the time needed to work directly with each and every one of our clients to offer them the best options we have, regardless of their size or the amount of money they spend with us.

Working Together to Alleviate Pandemic Related Disruptions

When it comes to stock, we offer several avenues to help. The mixture of a flexible buying program for materials combined with easy inventory management options allows us to reduce the overall cost of manufacturing and eliminate some of the headaches caused by supply chain management. We work to provide a flexible ordering schedule that gives our customers more control over what pieces they are ordering along with when they order it. This approach maximizes time to production while at the same time ensuring that they are able to use all of the stock that they commission.

Let’s take a look at one way we help our clients when they want to do some powder coating. In general, powder coating is the use of powdered materials to adhere to manufactured objects via an electrostatic charge. Aside from understanding the various pros and cons of powder coating, some customers need flexibility around the number of pieces to be coated, what colors they should be depending on consumer preferences, and when the pieces are actually coated and shipped out.

As an example, in some cases, a customer might know the number of pieces that they need but might not know exactly how many to make in certain colors. This could be because orders haven’t come in yet, potential disruption in powder coat supply chains, or uncertainty around the production schedule in general. In this type of scenario, we can work with our customers and they can have us hold some or all of their inventory until they know exactly what their customers want. At this point, we can then powder coat the pieces and send them out extremely quickly. Not only does this allow them to create exactly the parts in the colors they want, but it can also serve to reduce the overall lead time as well, due to the fact that we can preemptively set up the powder coating job and simply apply the correct color to the correct number of pieces once the order comes in.

Flexible Solutions For All

At the end of the day, our goal is to provide our customers with flexible, modern approaches to take advantage of logistics and rock-solid planning to help them better manage their orders, supply, and schedules, regardless of the size of the company or the order being placed. While most manufacturing suppliers might reserve options such as job shop orders or custom powder-coating schedules approaches for their biggest customers, we strive to be a trusted partner to every single person that walks through our door, regardless of their size or spend.

Another approach we use to help our customers is through our hybrid stocking programs. Hybrid stocking involves combining some of the benefits we provide to our customers in tandem to help them address multiple potential disruptions at a time. Some examples of hybrid stocking could be the combination of our custom kitting and inventory management programs, which means that clients can take advantage of the purchase and shipping power of our custom kitting process with our approach to inventory management, giving them the peace of mind when placing their orders and ensuring they get exactly what they need, right on time. We can also combine this with our custom buying programs, allowing different customers to benefit from each other by combining orders as needed to reduce both cost and delivery times.

Stop by our website and take some time to learn about all of the different approaches we use to make our customers successful. When you’re ready, give us a call and we can start working together to understand your unique manufacturing needs, from ordering to production, shipment, and inventory management.