10:55 – Barbara and I are doing inventory this morning. I really hate doing inventory. I prefer to use the OMGWO inventory method, but it does have the one obvious drawback. We can’t use typical inventory software, because it won’t accept reasonable things for “Quantity”, like “lots” or “too many”.
We just shipped what I thought was the next-to-last chemistry kit yesterday and the last kit this morning. Fortunately, I found one more completed kit. We haven’t finished doing inventory yet, but at the moment it looks like we have enough components to assemble 10 more kits, but that’s only because we’re currently showing only 10 test tube brushes in inventory. We may come across a case of those later, which’d mean we’d have enough components to build 11 kits (only 11 test tube clamps and 11 vials of pH test paper). And so on.
What we’ll do eventually is have one inventory bin for each item and maintain an accurate running inventory for each. But that’s a ways off. We do need to get it done, though, because we have biology kits and forensics kits in progress, and some items are common to all kits.
What worries me at the moment is that I’ve been talking to a woman who’s teaching chemistry at a private school and is likely to order several kits soon. I have no idea whether “several” means four or five kits or 15 or 20 kits. So we need to get a handle on inventory quickly as a first priority, generate POs for stuff we’re short of as the second first priority, and build more chemistry kits as the third first priority. Geez. I’m glad the biology book is off to production.