MY Firsthand Experience of Inventorying at Pillar Surplus

 As mentioned before Inventorying has many steps and can become very time consuming. A few days ago, I slipped on my steel toe shoes for once and got to experience a different task at Pillar Surplus. What I experienced showed me the drive my co-workers have to have, to reach success, when inventorying.

At first, I honestly thought it was going to be simpler than what my previous blog had said. It was the complete opposite after the first step. The first step was taking notes and making an observation on the brand, measurements and condition. Then we take our own pictures of the part to prove that nothing is being hidden from our customers that will be viewing them on the website.

After that we write its new lot number on it or its packaging with a vibrant paint marker and assign it to a bin, to make it navigable when it is purchased. Then this was repeated a couple more times at once for different parts to be efficient, and not make me go back and forth from the office to the warehouse.

Once we did get back into the office, I transferred all the pictures in the part number’s folder and eventually resized them for the website. The website iloveimg.com was very helpful, allowing me to resize multiple photos at once instead of one-by-one, I just had to unzip them with assistance. 

My favorite part was next, which was doing the research. Without knowing the commodity for sure, it was like investigating a mystery. It was interesting figuring out the parts use and features. I also liked calculating the averages and the discounts of the product prices because when you can do the math correctly for once, it feels good. Though, it’s not always easy because information can be limited. Sometimes parts lack a part number from the actual company it is from and can make things challenging. I was lucky to have success on all three of my parts.

Then of course my least favorite part of the process followed, which was creating the actual research form on Excel that would not stop glitching. When Excel kept glitching, it made things three-times longer than it was probably supposed to be and made me really impatient. I was thankful that I was only doing a few parts.  

When creating a research form without computer glitches, it is pretty straightforward when transferring information. All of this is for the boss to approve or disapprove the part for selling. When parts are disapproved the information found is either inaccurate, the part it’s worth selling and is scrap, or the parent company of Pillar Surplus takes the part and uses it themselves. Two of my parts were taken by the parent company to tag cylinders in the warehouse, but that was okay with me (less work ha-ha). So now being left with only one part, I just had to list it on the website which was easy enough. The website was conveniently navigable and didn’t give me any problems when adding my John Deere SPAL Fan to the shelf for consumers.

Overall, I give props to our Research and Inventory Specialist because this is the constant process every day. It is truly very in-depth and there are so many possible problems they can run into. It isn’t something I personally would want to make a career out of, but they were nice and helpful people to work within this process. It’s always great to learn and experience new things, but I am thankful for my marketing job under Pillar Surplus.