Word: pinging
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...gallon. That's over a billion coated wrap-around paper labels to buy every morning. The Non-Traditional Purchasing Department does the buying, and they do it very carefully. When millions of dollars move with each font change, after all, the more MBA's the merrier. As Ping put it, "Looking at a bottle, you wouldn't think hundreds of people did months of work just to switch a type of adhesive used in gluing the label to the bottle...
...years ago, a separate department for non-traditional purchases was only a circle on a new CEO's org chart. His goal, Ping explained, was "to consolidate the supplier base" and thereby "leverage spending." In English, this meant that where once each of the company's manufacturing plants had different local suppliers, they would now buy every item in larger volumes at lower prices from one or two national suppliers. "This seems to be the trend nowadays," Ping told me. "In the beginning, they hired some consultants to do a diagnostic and found out there was a saving potential. Then...
...specific case of the glue on the label, Ping's team sought their sellers online with the help of a dot-com "market maker" whose web page trumpets its expertise in "business-to-business online auctions for buyers of industrial parts, raw materials, commodities and services." For every different adhesive needed to attach label to bottle, Ping said, "they had at least four of five [online] bidders," each a national supplier. The winning bid represented a savings of 20 percent...
...said Ping, "they need to test [the new glues] in the R&D facility and then in the [manufacturing] plants." In all, the intellectual assembly line will move from CEO to management consultant to purchasing analyst to materials buyer to development tester to factory overseer before the new process for gluing the label to the bottle is complete. It is exceedingly unlikely that any of the 423-million-gallon daily drinkers will notice a thing...
...Coming from an intellectual family, I am excited about ideas, but often don't respect enough what it takes to transform an idea to reality," Ping confessed. "Everything is just so much more complicated than you think in school. [It's] a good reality check. To do well on this job requires a different set of intelligence from performing well in school: less abstract intelligence, but more people skill, common sense, just knowing how to get things done...