mistersqueegee
New member
I see from time to time guys complaining about how a supplier messed up their order. I have on occasion experienced this myself. In fact in my experience (I've ordered from just about all of them) no supplier is immune to this. Now sometimes these complaints can be more about putting down someone they don't like in favor of someone they do. How then can we tell if it's hype or if one is having a particularly bad time of it?
Really it's all in the math. I don't have exact numbers but in a recent discussion with one supplier he said they can have tens of thousands of orders going out in a month. That's a lot of orders. So the potential for things to go wrong can be huge. He even went on to say that they could have a bad month where maybe 50 orders have an issue. Based on this here's the math on this one (if I did it correctly since math wasn't one of my best subjects) -
20,000 orders in a month
50 incorrect orders
% of incorrect orders = one quarter of one percent
Now if a supplier does substantially fewer orders in a month (say 2000) they would have to have an equally low number to get that percentage (say 5 wrong). The benefit to the supplier with fewer orders is that they can take a little more time putting the order together to keep that rate down.
So the next time you get an incorrect order you can feel pretty special that you are in a very elite number of folks.
Really it's all in the math. I don't have exact numbers but in a recent discussion with one supplier he said they can have tens of thousands of orders going out in a month. That's a lot of orders. So the potential for things to go wrong can be huge. He even went on to say that they could have a bad month where maybe 50 orders have an issue. Based on this here's the math on this one (if I did it correctly since math wasn't one of my best subjects) -
20,000 orders in a month
50 incorrect orders
% of incorrect orders = one quarter of one percent
Now if a supplier does substantially fewer orders in a month (say 2000) they would have to have an equally low number to get that percentage (say 5 wrong). The benefit to the supplier with fewer orders is that they can take a little more time putting the order together to keep that rate down.
So the next time you get an incorrect order you can feel pretty special that you are in a very elite number of folks.