Data Collection & Reporting

Sample Data Sets and Reports

Ferguson has had experience with a number of service measure reports including the following:

• Fill Rate - Ferguson averages over 96% Fill Rate for stand alone store rooms while POU areas run better than 99%.
• Delivery Performance - Ferguson delivers 9 out of 10 one time buys by the promised date and achieves a 98% rate for catalogued items.
• Conversion of Specials - This measures the effectiveness of efforts to substitute generic items for hard to find or costly proprietary ones. The program needs to track both potential conversions as well as approved conversions.
• Inventory Reduction (Obsolete) - Ferguson has experience with a variety of ways to convert excess and obsolete material into cash.
• Inventory Effectiveness - Ferguson measures the volume of cataloged activity versus one-time purchases and specials to track how effectively they are at supporting the material needs at the lowest process cost. The goal is to move more material toward routine replenishment and away from special ordering processes.
• Cost Saving (Unit Price) - Ferguson benchmarks the last price paid for all catalogued items and then compares each subsequent purchased against the benchmark to see if the price is trending up or down.
• Cost Saving (Process) - During implementation, Ferguson works with the customer and their finance staff to create a program to track process savings in a form which is credible to their senior management.
• Quality (Transaction Management) - One important quality measure will be error rates in the creation, placement, receipt and payment of material purchase orders.
• POU Measures - These can cover a range of data including the rate at which they are created, the out-of-stock rate, the shrinkage or inventory error rate and the inventory effectiveness rate by department.
• Channel Simplification - The reduction in dependence on 2nd and 3rd Tier supply sources in favor of Primary Sources (i.e. manufacturers and fabricators). This is an indicator of both reduced channel cost as well as improved knowledge about the plant's requirements.
• Technical Training - Ferguson has managed a number of programs designed to improve technical capability at the user level. The effective programs are created in conjunction with plant supervisors and include training goals and incentives for performance.
• Supplier Diversity - Ferguson helps drive supplier diversity efforts, increasing participation by minority suppliers, at every plant where it operates.
• Spend and Usage Levels - By any accounting classification important to the customer.
• Warranty Tracking - Ferguson systems are designed to allow warranty information to be included in the database down to the serial number level.

Ferguson programmers have created several hundred custom reports for customers over the last 13 years covering virtually any data element captured as part of the operational database.

One of the elements that enhances Ferguson data significantly is the practice of tagging every item which flows through the system (even one time buys) with a commodity family code. This simple enhancement gives the company the ability to combine data from both catalogued and uncataloged purchases when developing commodity reports. It also makes it easier to review one time buy activity to look for opportunities to use volume to reduce overall costs.