We have worked in the industrial materials space for a couple decades. The challenges we faced in managing inventory and satisfying customers were enormous. Long lead times, volatile demand, purchase price volatility, huge inventory values, and long cash cycles to name a few. These industrial market conditions make it difficult to carry the right inventory at the right time and it can be very costly if you don’t.
Slow Moving Material is Frustrating
Why? Because the recovery value on prime material can be very low. We found we were lucky to get about 10% of original cost for scrapping prime steel material. This is extremely frustrating for everyone involved and moving excess prime material usually required a lot of people.
First, a team needs to get together a list of excess material that has not moved in a long time. Then they need to review that list with another team to make sure the data is accurate. Then the list is presented to Sales to make a final push to sell the material. A few weeks pass and the teams reconvene to find most of the material still has not moved.
So another meeting is held where the teams determine actual costs, how this excess material will hit the P&L, and what the lowest possible sale prices will be. Then one or more people take that list and start reaching out to everyone in their contact list. Emails are sent, phone calls are placed, spreadsheets are traded. Sometimes you get a decent response, sometimes you get a phone call in the middle of lunch offering half your asking if you can get it on a truck in an hour.
After pulling together several team members who have expended time and energy on something other than their primary task, wasting their time spending hours calling and emailing spreasheets, you are lucky to sell 20% of the material with a 25% return.
Reibus Can Help
At Reibus, we will change that. We have built an online B2B marketplace that will make it simple to trade your excess prime material. We give our customers access to a large virtual warehouse of prime material with shorter lead times, lower prices, and high quality.
Our platform is easy to use and beneficial for both buyers and sellers. We lower the cost of having bad inventory positions so that our customers can spend more time working on their business and less time working on their warehouse.
Thank you for visiting reibus.com and we look forward to working with you.
