Do you find yellow dog biscuits stuffed in your window frames? 

Well, I’d expect such occurrences to be as rare as a squirrel with a nut allergy but I find it all the time. Our house has mosquito nets on the windows as our summers are rather hot and the little blighters bite with pure human hatred.  The nets slide up and down between 2 small, vertical brushes on either side of the window to make them impregnable to blood seeking buzzers.

Within these brushes is where I find yellow dog biscuits. Not brown or red or any other colour, only yellow canine munchies. (And while we are on this important subject, if dogs are colour blind why do we give them different coloured biscuits?) You might presume that our half Jack Russell-half Mr. Bean dog Patch is responsible. Is he hiding them away for a sneaky midday or midnight snack? Does he know about some impending global dog chow shortage? I doubt Patch is the culprit as some of these windows are 7 metres off the ground and our dog is yet to work out how to find and climb a ladder and then put the ladder away without me knowing.

So, how do the biscuits find their way into my window frames? Not surprisingly perhaps, the biscuit thieves are birds; magpies to be precise. I guess they are storing up for a rainy day or winter or some other event. They are known to be attracted by shiny objects but I cannot see the connection with a fairly bland crunchy snack. Also, as Patch eats inside the house they cannot be my/his biscuits so the magpies are stealing them from another poor dog in the area.

The house has many windows so the amount of stolen food is quite high and as I now regularly clear out the stash, the amount really starts to add up.  Some pooch somewhere is not getting his or her full share to eat. That poor dogs’ human probably thinks their poodle is really content and eating well when in fact a magpie is regularly taking the yellow biscuits away. Of course, maybe the poodle doesn’t like the yellow ones. 

Ok Dave, what do we have here and what is this to do with Supply Chain? Let us take a look at what is happening:

1. Supply Chain inventory is not secure as stock shrinkage is occurring on an almost daily basis and yet nobody appears to notice. When did you last see your stock count?

          2. Stock is in the wrong location to serve the needs of the intended customers and consumers. When you have stock in the wrong places you will inevitably develop an overstock in your Producer warehouse network.

          3. Consumer demand is artificially high resulting in over-stocking and unnecessary spend along the Supply Chain.

          4. Ultimately, the final consumer is receiving poor Customer Service.

About the only aspect impressive in this is the quality of the logistics in getting the stolen biscuits from a dog bowl into my window frames. I will keep a look out for any stolen jewellery but I fear I will only have biccies to clear away.

Put simply, if you do not take great care with your own inventory somebody else will!

Image courtesy of bplanet at freedigitalphotos.net