#Supplychain – Keith Glasch's Blog

Long lead times won’t last forever, will they?

Pre-Covid lead-times for applied HVAC equipment used to be easy. 6 to 8 weeks for some rooftops, a few weeks longer for AHUs and complex fan systems. COVID and supply chain craziness wrecked all that reliable supply. Now, a large HVAC supplier has lead times on products that look like elephant gestation periods! (18 months, google it)

Our Yaskawa line of drives has improving delivery dates, but still out from what they used to be, the reason? Tiny components! Chip makers have been catching up on demand that frankly caught them by surprise.

We recently helped a chocolate factory with a drive problem, and sourcing a drive was trickier than usual, but we solved the problem. Thanks Yaskawa!

I hear from our suppliers in general that supply chain problems are getting better, and a year from now we won’t be talking about lead time problems. Until then plan ahead and expect the unexpected!

Selling products from stock works

Reznor unit heaters in Portland on our shelves

“You can’t sell from an empty wagon”, said Bob Nichols, the owner of Allied Refrigeration in Long Beach, CA told me when I was a young sales engineer at Johnson Controls. It was 1989 and I was blown away with this distributor’s high value, high service model. Bob passed in 2012, but his words stuck with me.

Part of the 40,000 square foot warehouse in Seattle

Thirty years later, as I get to make decisions with our leadership team about how to service customers, it is clear to me that being a hybrid manufactures rep and commercial HVAC distributor works. We increased our on-hand inventory over $1M as supply chain disruptions ran up the lead-times for products. It turned out to be a great idea to buffer longer lead-times with real on-hand products. We are selling more of nearly all of our products because we actually have it.

Thanks for the tip 33 years ago Bob!

#hvac #supplychain #customerservice

Supply chains and privately held companies in HVAC

Who knew months ago that supply chains would be disrupted in HVAC the way we see today? It is not just HVAC. I ordered a replacement car last month for my leased car ending December 2021. The new car won’t arrive until December! Good timing.

Most of the factories we represent at ACI Mechanical and HVAC Sales are privately held, and had fewer product availability problems, than publicly held firms. In my opinion it is because private companies Like Loren Cook Co. and Price Industries are not afraid to have real inventory on hand. We stocked up on Gree Mini Splits and VRF last year, and it is paying off with customers buying our products, in part because we simply have the products on hand! We just sold out of all of our 50 foot line sets, just because we had them.

We like to follow the old saying “You cannot sell from an empty wagon”.