Warehousing

FILO Warehousing

FR: "Why do we sometimes see such wild swings in the serial numbers?"

It's because it was whoever was working the line that day. The assembly was run by a Mexican woman in her mid-50s, and she ran it like a military unit, and she was very good, but when she was not there, they would make stuff up. It was whoever happened to be in that day.

And you had complaints about that because when they came back to repair, repair was like, what is this? And it turned out that they figured out that they were making up serial numbers in assembly. And they did something to solve it. But by that time, I was in publications, and it wasn't really my concern.

FR: And with the inventory that they had, how well did they do it first in, first out? Did the pallets stack up or did they have a system to keep pallets rotating?

No. When I was a material handler, they didn't. When that came up and I was told to mind my own business. You actually wanted the pallets in the back to be the first out because they were the oldest. So you would have things where you would, let's say in a self-storage unit, it would be 12 feet wide and maybe 24 feet. So it would fit six pallets. You would have the three pallets in the back that were made three months ago.

And then the three up front that were made three days ago because you're constantly putting in the first three, taking out the first three, putting in the first three, taking out the first three. And the back three never moved. Yeah. I remember saying to Alan [Kay] that it should be like groceries. So you rotate and bring him to the front. And he basically said, you're right, but I don't have the people. I would need to hire two or three more people and I don't have permission to do that.
(Interview with Marshall Mosley)