All Pipe on Trucks

[Jeffphill01]

Just a question regarding how everyone handles any/all pipe on the techs truck. The techs usually use pipe by the foot for jobs. We have 1 stick or a 10-foot piece on all tech's trucks. Would it be better to have 10 1-foot sections on all tech trucks? Does UOM which I'm trying to understand solve this issue? We only carry 10-foot sticks in our shop/warehouse so trying to understand and determine how this works for inventory. Any help is greatly appreciated.

[Canon]

We purchase from the vendor in 10' sticks so it is setup in our inventory in the warehouse and on the trucks as one 10' stick. Our technicians don't put a stick on the order for replenishment until they need a whole stick.

You can set up a UOM rule that will allow the tech to consume the pipe by the foot and then replenish a full stick once it is depleted. If you do, then I would recommend carrying at least two 10' sticks. If a truck only carries 1 stick he would need to use all 10 feet before it would replenish and may run into scenarios where he needs 5 feet and only has 3.

[Jeffphill01]

We go from 1/2"-2" on our trucks now. That means we would have to have 2 of each not to mention 2 of each of PVC(1/2"-2") and CPVC(1/2"-1"). That seems like a large amount of pipe to carry on our Cargo Van's. 

[Canon]

Hence the reason we don't have UOM setup for our 10' pipe on trucks. Our techs manage the amount themselves. When the one stick that they carry gets low they order a whole stick. The cost of that whole stick ends up being put on a single job instead of the 2-4 jobs it was actually used on.

Just an idea: If you set it up as a UOM and only wanted to carry 1 stick. I suppose you could set the min/max for truck stock as 5/15 that way when the tech gets down to 5 feet it would allow a replenishment of a full stick. It may create problems when stocking a new truck. The system may call for 1.5 sticks. 

[Jeffphill01]

Thank You Canon. Still getting used to UOM. Never had that in previous warehouse experience. What I ended up doing is setting the Max Min for 10 and 4 so if it gets to 4 ill just replenish a new stick. If we have larger jobs, we usually pull full sticks from our warehouse so our manager said to just use one stick for trucks as most of the time they will only use by the foot.