Inventory Control
These practices don’t involve the actual sharing of bar code data with the dealer’s computer. That becomes necessary when suppliers want to use the bar codes for inventory control. Large national retail chains, such as Lowe’s and The Home Depot, have long demanded this from their vendors.
Having bar codes also comes in handy when a dealer decides to meet market demand for green products. Many state and local governments want to construct buildings with lumber certified as meeting standards of the Forest Stewardship Council, but in order to help provide that lumber, dealers must be able to track the lumber’s source. Using technology certainly makes this job easier, particularly as the volume of FSC-certified lumber on the market grows.
Still, the growth of bar code tracking for lumber is likely to trail that of other sectors of the building materials industry. For instance, Star Lumber Co., in Wichita, Kan., uses identifiers on its manufactured products, but has yet to bar-code its pro-oriented lumber. Most pro yards track inventory by cycle or annual counts and see no reason to change that practice, even as many are changing over to self-designed computer systems or packaged IT systems such as Falcon from Activant.
Wheeler’s, a Rome, Ga.?based pro dealer, is in the midst of just such a changeover, using a system designed in-house. The dealer, which also manufactures windows, doors, and trusses at four separate plants, will eventually track its manufactured products with bar codes. Right now, the company creates its own order-tracking labels that it puts on its window jambs.
Wheeler’s president James Manis says he can see the advantage of tracking goods like windows and doors, because a missed door order can mean several days’ worth of delays that trickle down through the supply chain, bleeding cash from the company at every stop, not to mention taking critical blows to their service reputation. “If we lose a window in the manufacturing mill, we have to make it all over again and lose several days,” Manis explains. But lumber is a different matter, he says, because “we can ship another order immediately. … There’s an elevated reason to track manufactured goods or specialty products, but wood is just coming out of a big pile.”
Manis adds that the advantage bar-coding brings to the retail side of LBM–particularly in processing goods at the cash register–doesn’t do him any good because retail is now only a small part of Wheeler’s business and all purchases are made on account.
Nevertheless, Manis and other LBM dealers say they can envision a day where bar-coding will be used in lumberyards, probably in tracking bulk packaged sticks as well as in following more complicated products.
As bar-coding comes in through the manufactured goods and specialty products side of lumberyard sales, supply chain management experts say companies need to monitor their supply system, keeping a critical eye on where to eliminate waste, how to manage inventory, and how to speed service and delivery time. Many companies maintain inventory as a buffer against uncertainty, explains Huller, who besides chairing the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals is also a supply chain management consultant with Alden Consulting Group. Those that can find ways to use bar-coding and identifiers to give them more information to better manage inventory can reduce costs and improve service, he says.
And for those cynics who say they can’t find a value in using unique identifiers on products, Huller suggests they look again. “The mistake is to throw everything out with a broad brush and say, ‘That doesn’t work for me,'” he says. “Leaders look at parts of the system and find uses for the information that can add significant value and ask, ‘What will work for me?'”
–John Wall is a writer from Altoona, Pa.
