Ingenuity is order of business for MRO distributors and customers

By Susan Avery -- Purchasing, 6/20/2008 1:30:00 PM

The Applied Industrial Technologies service center in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, was without telephone service and Internet access due to the flooding for part of the time last week, but it didn’t stop the employees there from figuring out a way to process orders and service their customers. (None of the six employees who work at the service center were directly impacted by the flooding.)

“We used laptops and wireless air cards to get online and communicate with the corporate office in Cleveland,” says Kurt Tennyson, general manager of the Applied service center in Cedar Rapids. “They rerouted our printing function to another service center that printed our tickets and faxed them over the phone lines to us.”

Making deliveries too was a challenge for employees at the service center because many of the major routes in the city were closed for a time. It is located on the south side of town. Tennyson says one customer, a paper mill, is still down because it is without water and steam that’s usually provided by a coal plant which is flooded. “Unfortunately for them, the flood is having a detrimental impact to their business,” he says.

But, meanwhile, the customer is taking advantage of the unscheduled downtime to do some maintenance and the Applied service center has been able to provide it with the MRO supplies it needs.

Employees at the service center were in constant communication with another customer, a large food processing company with operations in Waterloo to determine whether they had the MRO items they needed to keep their facility running. “We apprised them of last Friday’s schedule and they appreciated that we were able to make the delivery even though it took the truck a long time to get there and back,” Tennyson says.

Last Friday, it took six hours round-trip to make a delivery to Waterloo. Normally it’s a 90 minutes trip one-way. “There was only way across the city from east to west,” he says. “It definitely took a lot of patience.”

Employees at the service center also are in contact with the purchasing manager for the city of Cedar Rapids about supplies City Hall and other government buildings may need. They are all under water, without electricity and at least a week away before they even think about clean up. “We met with them in a tent they have set up to let them know that we are here in case they need products to clean up such as safety products for people doing the work.” Products most needed, he says, are respirators, masks, safety glasses and gloves.

Suppliers to Applied kept in touch, calling to see if the service center needed them to expedite orders that they offered to ship via air because the roads were closed.