[GMCPaul]

To try and help explain why everyone that is a retailer is having a harder time keeping parts in stock is explained below.

The reason we've heard for all this from our manufacturers & suppliers is

The manufacturers of these and everything else it seems are waiting longer to make parts ( instead of stamping parts when they get close to running out or reach order quantities of 50-100 many are now waiting until there are 250 or more ordered before running a production run and then only doing as much as is needed at the time rather than making any extra) , then the companies have also reduced the amount of raw materials on hand so that they do not have the material to make the part and then they order the materials after they reach a certain order # until they reach the # they wait to order the material. A very good example of this is the case currently with our rubber manufacturer they say that in the past when they ran low on something that part may have had a 30-60 day lead time from order till in-stock has now become as bad as 180-270days ( 6-9 months )on some of their rubber products because now they place the order, then the manufacturing plant orders the raw material, then they later take delivery of the raw materials and begin manufacturing the product. So we are placing orders sooner to re-stock, placing orders that are larger and carrying a larger inventory to try and make up for this reduction in finished product inventory & raw materials by the suppliers. What further compounds things even worse are the raw material suppliers for the manufacturers are not keeping as large a inventory thus delaying their supply to the manufacturer in many cases, which then delays them making a full production run of the part or causing them to do only a partial run.

It all basicly boils down to the credit crunch caused by the financial markets I feel, companies like Citi that loaned to commercial bussiness's for financing to help them maintain inventorie levels or order raw materials have tightened credit lines & increased fees on money loaned over short time spans considerably making it harder to access the money needed and more costly to do so. Which then means the companies are having to tighten their inventory levels on both raw materials and finished products. With the fact the recession slowed the purchasing of products by retail customers this caused manufacturing companies to reduce the amount of inventory they kept as it was now excessive for the market, now that the market is beginning to turn around these low levels are causing backorders.
GMCPaul