Tool Steel Distributor Program for Stockholders and Wholesale Buyers

The account

Tool Steel Distributor Program Accounts

Your account sits with the commercial desk, and it follows the account rather than the order, so the person answering your fourth list is the person who answered your first. Technical work on the same account sits with a technical desk of six, inside a commercial and technical group of eighteen, and it comes in at the enquiry stage rather than after the order is placed.

The part of a tool steel distributor program that costs the most to get wrong is what happens to the customer standing behind your enquiry. Here is what happens.

An enquiry arriving from a tool room in its own name

is pointed back to the distributor in that market, or told that the material is bought through its distributor.

Any quotation that follows from it

is issued to that distributor.

When you forward a tool room's question yourself

the answer comes back to you, and the tool room stays yours to serve with it.

Checkable in one afternoon

That claim is checkable in one afternoon, before you commit anything. Have one of the tool rooms you supply send us an enquiry directly, under its own name, with a real grade and a real section on it. Read what comes back.

There should be

• 01No price on it
• 02No request for the volume or the project behind it
• 03No name asked for beyond the one that wrote in
• 04A week later, no follow up

A supplier that intends to reach past you has to ask for one of those three things to do it, and asking is visible.

Quotations, stock positions and dates go to distributors, stockholders and wholesale buyers. Nineteen years of this account structure across more than 100 countries is what the rest of this page describes in working detail.

Line by line

Mixed Replenishment Lists, Line by Line

A replenishment list from a distributor is rarely one grade. It carries three or four of the stock grades, one or two that are not stocked, a spread of sections, a quantity against every size, and a delivery condition that may or may not be written down. The single most useful thing a mill can do with that list is refuse to answer it as one thing.

Four things read off the line before a date is attached

Every line is answered on its own. Before a date is attached, the technical desk reads four things off it.

01 · Designation

The designation your customer wrote mapped onto one of our fourteen grades and confirmed in writing so you can forward the mapping.

02 · Section

The section, and which forging line it belongs on.

03 · Delivery condition

The delivery condition, because annealed and pre-hardened are two different products and a line that does not say which one gets a question rather than an assumption.

04 · Downstream allowance

What the operations after ours need left on the piece.

Then each line comes back marked stock or production, with its own date. Stock lines answer immediately at 7 to 10 days. Production lines carry 25 to 35 days from melt, covering melting, electroslag remelting, forging, heat treatment, finishing and the eight inspection steps, with the forging line named.

One line on that list is worth putting there on purpose. That line does not come back with the others. It goes to production scheduling first, because the top of a range is where a date stops being a standard figure and becomes a question about which press is free and which ingot the piece starts from.

If scheduling has not confirmed inside the 24 hours, that line says it is with scheduling and gives the hour it will follow, while every other line on your list is already answered.

A date offered for the heaviest section on a list without anyone consulting a schedule is a number chosen to be safe, and safe numbers are the ones that cost you three weeks of turnover on the lines that could have shipped from stock.

The second thing worth doing costs nothing at all

Two replies, side by side

Send the same list again a fortnight later and read the two replies side by side.

The stock lines

should still read 7 to 10 days, and for the same reason as the first time: those five grades are replaced out of our own melting rather than topped up off somebody else's rack, so the figure describes how the shelf is refilled instead of what happened to be left on it that week.

The production lines

should sit in the same band and name the same forging line.

A stock position sourced elsewhere

moves between the two replies, because it was somebody else's stock position both times.

What you end up with is one document that can be priced and quoted from directly: grade mapping, stock or production, a date per line, and the certificate contents each line will carry.

Forward it as it stands

Answers Written for Your Customer

An enquiry that reaches you from a tool room is usually not a purchasing question. It is a metallurgical one wearing a purchase order's clothes: whether this grade will hold up in that die, what the drawing designation actually corresponds to, how much stock to leave on before the tool room's own hardening cycle. You can answer it twice, once by asking us and once by rewriting what we send, or the answer can arrive already written for the person who asked.

Send it as it arrived. What comes back is addressed to that question and carries five parts.

Grade names outside our fourteen get a written comparison instead of a substitution: which of ours is nearest, where it differs, and what that means for the tool described in the enquiry. Nothing is quietly swapped for the closest thing in the warehouse, because a substitution that is not written down is one your customer discovers on the bench.

Three situations get a question back rather than a confirmation

All three are cheaper to raise before a saw runs than after.

• 01

  Three that do not line up

  A grade, a section and an application that do not line up, which is usually a designation copied wrongly somewhere up the chain.

• 02

  A tolerance that will not survive

  A finished tolerance that will not survive the hardening cycle the tool room intends to run in its own furnace.

• 03

  The extreme of a range

  A section sitting at the extreme of a range, which goes to scheduling before any date is quoted.

Document requests are handled on the same clock. Where your quality department, or your customer's, sends a checklist, it comes back answered item by item within 24 hours on a working day, with a sample certificate on the grade being quoted attached to it, rather than a general company pack for somebody to search through.

The technical desk of six writes these, with the metallurgical questions going to the engineering group of sixteen that issues the process regimes. The form is the point: an answer you forward is worth several times an answer you have to translate first, and the difference shows up as the hours you did not spend rewriting and the authority your customer hears in the reply.