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NAME? D WHAT'S IN A Where is it written that people who work in the warehouse have to be called warehouse employees? Change the title, change the mindset and get amazing results, says distribution expert Jason Bader. By Jason Bader, Pr incipal The Distr ibution Team Jason@Distr ibutionteam.com oes anyone remember a time when the guy with a mop and an enormous ring of keys was called a janitor? It seemed like all of a sud- den they went off to a convention and came back as custodians.The word jan- itor refers to someone who cleans and maintains a building; the word custodi- an refers to a caretaker, someone in charge.Although the name change was a simple swipe of the pen, the percep- tion of the job responsibilities changed drastically.No longer were the men and women of this profession cleaning up after someone else.They were the care- taker of the facility. It became their baby. The mindset had changed to one of ownership. Isn't that something we strive for in our distribution businesses? When we teach classes on inventory management, we tell the students we want them to all sleep like owners of the business. Owners sleep like babies. That means that every hour they wake up and start bawling.The real goal of the session is to teach the participants how to take ownership of their job.Where can they think like an owner? How do they remove the barriers to net profit? The hardest part of developing a solid inventory management strategy is changing themindset of the people that work with us and for us. Often, the real change has to start with our own pre- 24 FEDA News & Views conceived notions about the roles in the company.What kind of a company do we want tomodel in the future?Will we be sales-dominated,or sales-oriented? Is inventory cash,or is it just stuff that we store in a warehouse? If we are going to invoke amental change,we need to pro- vide verbal reinforcement of the con- cepts we are trying to implement. In all of our educational sessions,we refer to the warehouse as a vault.Why? The place is filled with money. In a hard-goods distribution company, the largest asset is inventory.According to Webster's, awarehouse is a placewhere goods or merchandise is stored. But are we really in the business of storage? No, we are in the business of turning and earning.The simple change of verbiage from"warehouse" to"vault" is a catalyst for a change in mindset. If our vaults were actually filled with stacks of cash, would we manage them the same way? This is a great question to ask your material handling team. I imagine that they would come up with some thought-provoking answers.The trick is to draw the correlation between the answers given and how they will con- duct themselves in the future. Calling their work environment a "vault" is a subtle reminder that they are the man- agers of the company's cash. I would encourage you to emphasize the point by changing how you refer to the position of warehouse employee. They are "Cash Managers" or the "Vault Management Team. "This is the time to be creative. Changing their perception of how they view the job will yield amazing results.Where is it written that people who work in the warehouse have to be calledwarehouse employees? Change the title, change the mindset. I recently ran into another change in verbiage that really emphasized the cash management concept. This one related to the purchasing agent. In our compa- nies,who do you think spends the most money? Hands down it is the folks who generate the purchase orders. Each buy is an investment of company money.We don't just buy items to fill our vault.The idea is that we are using company funds to create a return on that investment. The timing of the buy, howmuchwe pay and the quantity we purchase all deter- mine the return on investment. I have a good friend who once told me that "the art of purchasing is a thousand small decisions done right every day. " Done right,we canmaximize our return on the dollars we invest in inventory. Done wrong, these investments can take a company to its knees in a heartbeat.The company I visited recognized the signifi- cance of this role. In order to change the mindset of the purchasing team, the term "Investor" replaced the traditional title of "Purchasing Agent. " Anyone can purchase SKUs,but an investor expects a continued on page 67