Maintaining Stock

As the summer months approach, My Father's World is rallying its team to prepare the warehouse for the upcoming busy season. This involves stocking the shelves to maximum bin capacity and fulfilling work orders to create partial packages that accompany each curriculum, all while keeping up with the steady flow of daily orders, because the families who enjoy our curriculum will always be the priority!

When maintaining stock on our shelves, we must first determine how much each bin can hold for a specific book. These are known as our min/maxes. It would be helpful for me to explain what a bin is. Bins serve as the virtual storage locations for our entire curriculum. Each bin corresponds to a physical location in our warehouse, and every book has a part number assigned to it. The curriculum it belongs to determines which bin it is designated for. For example, say I had a box of #11762, which is the stock-keeping unit number (part number) for the book Currency Kit. I know that book is included in our Exploring Countries and Cultures curriculum, which is assigned the bin A1001. So, Currency Kit #11762 is located virtually in the bin A1001 and physically on our Exploring Countries and Cultures shelves. Still with me? Good. Now that you understand what a bin is, I can explain our bin mins/maxes. These are relatively straightforward. The max refers to the maximum number of a specific book that can fit on the shelf, while the min indicates the minimum number of books allowed on the shelf. Determining the min/max values significantly helps calculate the necessary stock for partial package builds and ensures the shelves do not deplete for order picking. Our excess stock is stored at our larger warehouse, which is overseen by the wonderful Chris M. He monitors these min/max levels to prepare for transfers. If he misses something, our warehouse lead, Leonard, notifies him to expedite the transfer.

During our preparation for busy season, we intentionally overstock the shelves to maintain a balance of our inventory from the books pulled for our partial package building process. Each of our curricula, from Animal Train to High School 3, has a partial package included in them. The partial packages serve various purposes. They save time for our pickers during the busy season. Instead of having, say, 23 individual picks for a single order, there may be only 3 to 4 due to consolidating multiple items into one box, or partial package, ahead of time, resulting in fewer picks. It also provides extra protection for the books and may be less overwhelming for the mom opening her package for the first time.

While partial packages are ultimately helpful for everyone, building them does require extra prep time before the busy months as well as planning by our front office team to make sure we have what we need to build the partial packages. Different members of our team comb through past sales and market changes to determine how many partials we will need to pre-build and how many books that we don't print in-house we need to order to stay on top of our orders.

This careful preparation by everyone on the My Father's World team is one of the many ways we stay ahead and avoid having orders on hold for long periods, allowing us to deliver our curriculum to your door in no time!