Store Front

With another new year, I thought it unforgivable that our store front hasn't changed much over the years.  Our original store name from 1997 had been effectively erased by a bus accident.  Now, it's even covered by the guard house.  Some effort had been put in 1999, although virtually only "Water Systems" is visible from the street.

Last year, I put a Sta-Rite tarp on the left of the store.  I was elated to get an inquiry on pool products a few weeks after.  (These things have effects after all.)  Towards October I also added an Aermotor poster.  And then we temporarily moved office as we started renovations.  Unfortunately, after the renovations finished, I couldn't find the Sta-Rite tarp anymore. 

2010 ended and a new year began.  We stopped a bit to focus on our primary work.  And pretty much no effort was being made any more on our store front.

While a good store front might be a secondary priority for a company like us, since we are primarily a wholesaler, not taking advantage of our front might be remiss of marketing savvy.

We are located at Mayon St. (or Avenue, according to PLDT), and it's not a small street at all.  It's a commercial street, though new developments have only started the past few years.  We are two blocks away from Suki Market, we're near the local church and baranggay hall, and SM's Sun Residences is rising at the South end of Mayon.

So, to me, that we would not do even simple steps to increase our marketing presence is a loss of opportunity.  So what did I do?  I brought an unused plastic holder back to life and filled it with excess fliers and brochures.  I hung a big A.O. Smith tarp by our window -- it still needs ironing though.  I rummaged a "farmland" beside our store, and found a ready-to-be-thrown Atmor sign from our retail days.  I taped it at the window in a not-so-nice way.  I saw the Aermotor banner hanging by the guard house, but it looked too drab now so I decided against it.  Instead, I'd been eyeing two more tarps from our exhibits.  They looked nice and green and could work effectively to accentuate our sky blue office.  All these hacks weren't so hard.

Next one should be a nicer store sign.  Hmmm, we could even use our underwater lights to put on a colorful show.  Not.  Well, at least a store sign with big nice letters.  And then, afterwards?  Perhaps our service vans and motor bikes...

Christmas Around The Corner

It's December.  I almost forgot that this blog has turned one year old already!  I just read the original post, entitled "December", and it was amusing to read that back then, I was writing about renovations.

Much changed since then.  A major renovation actually happened (although it's not quite finished).  The vibrant blue of our office gave way to a lighter shade of pale.  The garage is now actually empty, and almost setup for residence.

And then again, there are the people.  We've experience the highest rate of employee turnover over this year, due in part to improvements in our processes and better checks and balances.  Some key personnel have left to chase their dreams or to look for peace.  They will be sorely missed.  More have moved on to other work where they have found their new homes.  To them, we wish luck and a better life.

Meanwhile, with Christmas around the corner, everyone has turned busy bee for the Christmas preps.  Perhaps with all the changes that have happened, the Christmas party is one more comfort for our restless minds.  After all, we managed to miss the Team Building event this year.  At least the year-end party is a vestige of the days merry past.

It's been a difficult year.  But we have higher hopes still.

Moved In!

Finally, for what felt like a long time, we've moved in to our new office!  It's still the same location, right by the precarious intersection of Mayon and M. Cuenco, where a Florida bus once hit the corner of our humble store, by the border between Quezon City and Manila.  But with a new paint, wiring and cables, new tables and chairs and partitions, and a much more sensible arrangement for employees, our office felt imbued with a breath of new life. 

Right now, it's not yet a 100% done, mission accomplish project.  There are still the oddities from our office's previous iterations like the uncovered section of the aircon's vent as well as the out-of-place legacy PBX hopelessly visible and the unchanged long haul cabling up and about the office and nearby departments.  There are still undefined or temporary locations for telecom and printing equipments.  And people places will still be changing with time.  We still have lots of ideas to improve.  This may be a relatively short term fix for capacity stress.  But fixing we will do.  For us right now, we can accept and embrace the changes moving forward.  And we like it like that.

Office Renovation

For a lot of people who've seen our Metro Manila office, one thing obvious was that it was very crowded.  That impression is amplified on those mid-morning hours when everyone was there -- on those times, it was a market place. (Not on those times, it was just an internet cafe.)


Over the past week, however, it's been desert empty, save for the workers and the dust.  We're finally on our scheduled major office renovation!  We're expecting the project to finish in a couple of weeks or so.  In the mean time, we've moved half of us to the obliging service department next door, and the other half to the training room of our sister company Thermovar Pipes.

Moving and subdividing our office to nearby locations is not without challenges.  We had to minimize phone, fax, computer and network downtime as we reshaped our infrastructure for our ad hoc relocation.  Fortunately, with just a little shuffling, network cabling wasn't too hard; we were able to reuse most of our network cables.  Sales executive Alexis Garcia, our resident telecom expert by night, managed the rewiring of our phone and fax system to working order.

This project is a major makeover that's long overdue.  There's been so many changes over the years that has stretched our office capacity to its limits.  With this over, we expect to maximize space in our humble office and to increase overall efficiency in our operations.

Walk-In and Phone-Order Sales

Early this year, we started diligently classifying sales whether they're sales booked by agent, ordered through phone, or walk-in sales.  We have a lot more sale types like "project" and "key" but we haven't yet discussed the "proper" classification of sales.

I primarily requested due diligence in proper sales classification to measurably monitor an aspect of customer satisfaction.  Since we have stocks at two different locations -- our in-store "walk-in"cache of popular goods and our 15-to-20-minute-away warehouse, I wanted to know how often do we make our walk-in customers wait a long time for their orders to arrive.

How do we know if a sale should be a walk-in sale?  The question seems simple enough.  But there are some aspects that need clarification.  An unannounced customer literally walking-in on our store is obviously a walk-in sale.  But what do we do about customers we got to talk on the phone or email?  For these "announced" customers, if their order is vague or unclear during previous dialog, we still categorize them as walk-in sales.  But if their order is known before their arrival, we consider that as phone-order booking.

It is still a question if we should even segregate walk-in sales from phone-order bookings.  Phone-order bookings have a propensity to be changed upon customer arrival.  Based on our records, phone-order bookings and walk-in sales constitute less than 2% of our sales.  That is still substantial however, and surprising for our humble office with hardly space to accommodate waiting customers.

15-Minute Warehouse Logistics

Within the last five years, our company has enjoyed excellent growth.  A lot of our growth can be attributed to expanded market as well as a more national presence in the Philippines.  This growth however also meant an inventory level our humble office could not quite adequately handle. 

Over the last few years, we've tried several setups to balance operational efficiency and customer service.  We still maintain our sales and administrative office here in Mayon.  But we've gone through several warehouses and process changes along the way.

At first, we only just had most of the bulky items moved to our main warehouse.  We still have a lot of items in our smaller stockroom here.  In our computer system, we maintained two separate inventory levels for both facilities.  Unfortunately, this system made physical inventory counting difficult.  Worse, a lot of our transactions require stocks from both facilities.  This made fixing the paperworks difficult and needlessly complex.

So we decided to setup our one true warehouse.  Everything should come out from there.   This way, we only maintained inventory level in one facility.  All our transactions would be under one facility.  It sounded simple and mechanic.  But one constant reaction we got was the dissatisfied look from our walk-in customers as they waited for items from our 15-minute away warehouse.  Walk-in sales is not big percentage-wise, but each one interacts with our office people more closely than most agent and call-in bookings.

Last year, we changed things a bit to improve our response time and hopefully our customer service.  It's actually much more complicated, but that's what you get when you try to put more intelligence into the system.  We would now maintain two facilities again: our Main warehouse and our Walk-in "warehouse".  Our Walk-in warehouse should be a very small representation of the top 30 SKUs most ordered by Walk-in/Pickup clients.  For each SKU, there would be only 1 unit, except for a couple of SKUs people order by 3s or 4s.  Every week, we refresh this lineup to refill the blanks.  Ideally, the Walk-in items are visually countable in just a couple of seconds.  We're not there yet, however, due to space reasons.  Our main warehouse contains the rest of our inventory.  This system requires that we differentiate walk-in and pick-up sales from booked sales.  All booked sales should get their items from the Main warehouse.  For any one sale transaction, items should only come from one facility.

We made another optimization soon after that.  We moved small items and spare parts back to our diminutive Mayon office.  Now that almost sounded like we went back to square one.  The difference was that we did not add another facility.  We still only have Main and Walk-In.  Only this time, we partitioned Main to Warehouse and Mayon.  Any one SKU under Main will either be in Warehouse or Mayon, but not both.  Our pick list now denotes the location of the SKU under the Main warehouse. 

This current setup improves on our customer response time.  It also helps our Service department because spare parts are now closer at hand.  Due to space reasons, counting is still a challenge.  But the enforcement of only one location per SKU diminishes this problem somewhat.

Over time, as we continue to optimize our processes, there will be more changes to improve how we can serve our customers better.

Clean Up Day

Today was a long overdue General Clean Up Day in Amici Office.  The last one was 11 months before, which as cleaning goes is ages ago.  One can imagine what sort of junk had piled over the year, not to mention the little critters who enjoyed a relatively peaceful colony as pests in the shadows. 


We had a much more concerted effort in the clean up process today.  Whereas before when there were but few cooperative persons who participated in each Clean Up Day, this whole afternoon was a whole team effort among various departments.  That was necessary after all.  It was not about tidying up our microscopic world which is our own tables, sometimes hiding under the rug the things we didn't know what to do with.  Our office wasn't big to begin with, so any mess around was a mess shared with everyone.  From now on, we'd prefer to have a great clean office we can enjoy each day. 

To celebrate our humble victory, we capped the day with two boxes of pizzas.  Of course, this time, we made sure to tidy up after eating.

There will be more Clean Up days to come.  But we don't have to wait for that long.  Instead, we hope to treat each day an opportunity to stay clean and maintain orderliness.  5S -- I still remember somewhat attending a seminar on that a couple of years ago.  Only four of us attended that seminar with DTI, and only I am left in the same office now.  Unfortunately I wasn't able to implement much of what we learned then.  But it's never too late for that.  A company wide training session on 5S will be most beneficial.  And to make it part of our company culture.


We thank Gay who scheduled and directed the event, as well as Lisa and Michelle who procured necessary supplies beforehand.  We thank everyone who participated in making our little office just a little bit more habitable.