Is it ever going to get better?

[rockstar.esq]

Quotes for material pricing and lead times are double to triple where they were a year ago.

I can't place an order without a few manufacturers doubling their lead time at the last moment.

During my apprenticeship I was on a project where we built a factory from the ground up in less time than these firms currently need to make a few mundane light fixtures.

Heck, I can't even get a quote from some manufacturers in a reasonable amount of time.   

I'd just love to know about honest efforts to clear the backlog.  

[Frosty]

I hear you, it's everywhere but discussing it here will just get us edited.

Frosty The Lucky.

[ThomasPowers]

I think it points out that "Just In Time" manufacturing is based on the premise that "nothing will go wrong". When crossed with offshoring; which makes things even more susceptible to things going wrong in transit if nothing else;  you get an economic version of Voltaire's "Candide". 

[SHC]

Everyone’s having trouble getting “stuff” right now. In the water industry we’re like chickens with our heads cut off trying to get big plumbing materials. To be fair, some of that has to do with manufacturing facilities being damaged this past hurricane season. 
I’m currently on a 90 day wait list for (20) 5/8” ball valves and some water meter boxes. I got the last box of meter couplings my supplier had. 

[George N. M.]

I have a revolutionary idea:  How about manufacturers and suppliers stockpiling the stuff they think they will sell in the next 60-90 days?  We could call it "inventory."  And they could put it in a big building we could call a "warehouse."  Then, when a customer orders something an employee could go out to the "warehouse" and take the ordered item out the "inventory" and it could be sent to the customer by a process called "delivery."

I think with a little honing and filling out this idea could get me a nomination for a Nobel Prize in Economics.

"By hammer and hand all arts do stand."

[Frosty]

5 minutes ago, George N. M. said:

big building we could call a "warehouse."

Ooooh, a place to House your Wares! 

I think I'm starting to get the idea now.

Frosty The Lucky.

[Glenn]

Everyone is trying to cut costs.

The warehouse ships to the store 2 times per day. The store sales counter says yes we can have that first thing it in the morning from our warehouse. If the local warehouse is out of stock, they call and get the item from the regional warehouse.  

They used to call this living hand to mouth, but today it is the "just in time" norm.  The customer is left with no other option. 

[JHCC]

The "just-in-time" practice was originally developed by Toyota in the 1970s as a way to reduce overhead, since the company wouldn't have to pay warehousing costs. The resulting increase in profit allowed Toyota to reinvest in R&D, lower their prices (which in turn increased their sales), and pay larger dividends to their shareholders. It's also one of the factors that helped them (and other Japanese manufacturers that copied them) to eat the American car industry for lunch.

Another advantage of JIT production is that ordering in smaller increments gives a company greater flexibility if market conditions change, so they're not stuck with warehouses full of unusable parts and product. 

The problem, as Thomas points out, is that such a system depends on things not going wrong more than the system can handle. Under normal circumstances, the system can absorb moderate fluctuations in the supply chain, and it actually does it fairly well, especially when those fluctuations are isolated and/or short-term. Unfortunately, when you have a global pandemic that disrupts just about every industry and labor market on the planet for over eighteen months, that's more than ANY system can handle. 

In short, I doubt JIT production would have become and remained the gold standard in inventory management for almost half a century if it wasn't generally so effective. The fact that the COVID pandemic created conditions that hit it in its weakest spot does not mean that any other system would necessarily have done any better.

[ThomasPowers]

(Also inventory taxes encouraged low inventories.)

We've seen previous disruptions to JIT systems: typhoons, earthquakes, Fukushima... however even when relatively widespread they are generally pretty limited in time and distance and other ways of getting stuff can work even if it's more expensive.   We are experiencing a global problem and unless I can get the Grey Aliens to go into chip fab there are not many work arounds. 

[Daswulf]

Backordered parts have been a bigger issue in the collision repair industry as well, let alone manufacturing.

We just had a vehicle totalled due to the fact some critical parts were backordered. The ins. company decided it was cheaper to total it than to pay the long rental while the vehicle sat around waiting on parts. 

[Steve Sells]

Just SORTA finished a  job I was on where we could not get the needed parts to finish; so they cancelled the rest and will reschedule after/if/when parts are ever found, then we can do the remaining work, they say maybe January or February

They forget that is not the way things work in the union, We are laid off from this job now, and by time a parts arrive, I and that crew I had should already be on another job site, and no longer available for that one.  The contractors wont just be able to pick up where they left off so easily

[rockstar.esq]

I hear you on the just in time thing.  I definitely hear you about warehousing thing as well.  

Personally, I think they should stop taking new orders until and unless they can actually provide guarantees of delivery.

It's been two years of this, which is why it's difficult for me to believe that the manufacturing and supply chain can't be more honest/ accurate/ accountable about what's going on.

 

[arkie]

To quote Bob Dylan...."The times they are 'a changin".  Folks, we are just going to have to learn to live with it...for a long time.  It's bigger than all of us...it's world wide .  Too many gears in the works that just can't seem to mesh.  Sorta like shooting a BB at a battleship.  I hate to sound like a pessimist, but............

[TWISTEDWILLOW]

It’s the same here in the small engine repair business,

half of what I order get stuck on back order and I feel like a broken record trying to explain to angry customers every day that I can’t fix their stuff till I got the parts and I can’t make the parts come any faster, 

some are understanding and other just get down right angry and hateful. 
 
 

[Irondragon Forge ClayWorks]

We had our propane furnace go out in the first cold snap around the first of November. We ordered a new furnace then and our HVAC folks told us it would be around the 14th of December before their supplier will be able to get it in. Glad we didn't get rid of our wood stove. Like arkie said better get used to it. A country boy can survive, I feel bad for the city folks.

[SHC]

We had trouble finding propane and propane tanks when we bought our house a few months ago. Almost a month of cold showers and cooking on a couple double burner hot plates kinda sucked.
With one of my best friends having about a dozen giant oak trees knocked over at his house by storms the past few years, I had my propane fire place converted to wood burning just yesterday. He’s already got saws, axes and a log splitter, I just need to get over there with my boys to provide the labor in exchange for a share of the wood.

I think the smallest of those trees is about three feet diameter at the base. And being out in the boonies it takes a while to get power restored when it gets knocked out, so I’m gonna stock up on firewood. 

[anvil]

the only solution is political and politics are frowned on here. 

[rockstar.esq]

Anvil,  I take your point and agree that we shouldn't get into the political side of it.  That being said, I see this as an expansion of the kind of selective shortages in years past.  Whenever there was a run on something, and the supply/manufacturing chain couldn't keep up, I'd hear people telling me that nobody in that chain could afford to invest in infrastructure when the demand would inevitably dry up as soon as shelves were stocked again.

That entire argument assumes a closed economic episode within a generally static consumer trend.  It ignores opportunity to shift the market in favor of the firms that are most responsive to its needs.

Assuming that everything customers do will always be either hoarding or static consumption ignores the very real possibility that making things reliably cheap and plentiful will often increase your market share.  This is pretty obviously the way that most of the largest firms went about building their empires at their start.

Lots of negative things can be truthfully said about online retailing giants.  However, in the midst of a two year period of constantly increasing delays and pricing for construction materials, the majority of products sold by those online retailing giants are arriving within two weeks.  That's much longer than the two days it used to be, but then again, I have firsthand knowledge that three massive distribution centers were built by one of those online retailing giants in my area.  Two of them went up during the supply crisis.

The local retailers who can't or won't find a way to be useful will lose business to firms that do what's necessary to deliver.  

But honestly, and sincerely, I could absolutely live with the prices and the delays if these firms would at least be honest.  Everyone is pretending that "the situation is constantly changing" yet the outcome is incredibly consistent.  After two years of this, it's difficult to believe that efforts across the markets are being coordinated to fix the problems.  It often looks like the supply chain is happy to raise the price, lower the expectations, and deliver when they get around to it.  I literally get angry responses from factories when I offer to pay extra for faster domestic shipping.

Before all this stuff hit, we could expect at least 10% of the light fixtures we ordered to be massively delayed by an unaccountable manufacturer.  Back then, we chalked it up to Architects preferring the sort of bleak and depressing minimalist nonsense that only the most unstable "artisans" will make in their underground concrete bunkers.  One assumes that it's difficult to get much production on light fixtures when the maker insists on working in the dark.  

Sometimes I wonder if there are warehouses full of cheerful building finishes going unused simply because the design trends are stuck on sad looking cubes.

[Steve Sells]

The contractor of my prior post had us install standard suspended ceiling 4 inch diameter can lights, in the drywall ceiling, I warned him that to trouble shoot or repair them down the road,  the drywall ceiling would have to be torn out, so we need to get the correct ones.  He said to install them anyway that is what they want.  I dont want to be the one to have to service them if they stop working.  That lighting circuit is with more lights that have not been installed yet, and we did not get to test them before they installed the hard ceiling either, they wont be powered until January at the soonest. then they will find out if they work or someone has to remove the ceiling to fix them. another reason I dont want to go back there, the GC was always in such a rush to get his job done, he wouldn't let the rest of us get ours done first.

[rockstar.esq]

Steve,

I can feel your frustration, you want to do a good job in a tough situation with opposition coming from all quarters. 

Speaking of can lights, we had a job recently where they used recessed LED lights where the "trim" gets mudded in so there is zero profile.  The result is a nominal 2" diameter hole for the light to shine out of.  Nobody outside of the electricians was upset that there's no way to readily service the light with a hole that small.  "Just do what you're told".

Well, the client moved in and despite all the photometric studies, charts, and graphs, those little pinholes of light don't "feel like enough" when every surface is painted some sad shade of black.

Orders came down to replace the light engines and their drivers in situ.  I forced the manufacturer to actually explain how that was supposed to happen.  Turns out, they planned on sending us a little suction cup with which to pull the light engine down out of the housing.  I asked if they'd tested it.  They said yes... but it doesn't work consistently.  They ultimately told us to run a screw directly into the light engine, grab the screw with needle nose pliers, and jerk it free.  Now we knew what circuits to shut down so as to ensure safety there.  The screw approach worked, but that's a seriously risky protocol for anybody sent to service one of these terrible things after the fact.  

I think the public wrongly believes that LED technology means you've got a maintenance, and heat free product.  That's simply not true.  Nearly all of our LED warranty claims are for fixtures that quit working shortly after installation.  Some jobs the infant mortality will run near 10%.  I can't even imagine telling my guys not to test the lights.  Half the satisfaction of doing the job is seeing your systems working.

 

[ThomasPowers]

Electronics follow the bathroom curve for failures: a lot of them at the start, then few for a long time and then as they age out a lot of them again.

[Steve Sells]

so far we had installed 40 LED can lights in other areas and 5 had to be replaced in the first 3 days. In this newest area I am worried about we have 4- 4 inch and 7- 6 inch LED cans waiting to see if they fail or not when hooked up to the 16 new 2x4 drop in LEDs

[rockstar.esq]

Steve,

Wow, that's a 12.5% failure rate on those cans!  If the rest of the lights follow suit, you'll have at least three more fixtures that need replacing.  

Plus recessed cans are often engineered to barely survive the stress of a single installation.  It can be tough to replace the broken stuff without parts of the brackets or housing collapsing under their own weight.  

 

[anvil]

I ordered two attachments for my Kubota tractor, a bobcat quick release adapter and a set of forks. I ordered the first last April. I'd been looking since the previous November. Prices nearly doubled and delivery time went from 2 weeks to 2 months minimum. 

I also scored a tornado 230 engine for my Willys pu. From Idaho to western Colorado took 3 months!

[Purple Bullet]

I understand and share the frustration, but look at the bright side. The skills that most of you have developed will be even more valuable as this progresses. The times ARE changing and if we have learned anything from history, it is that we never learn from history.