District 6 Senior Buyer Denise Cooley holds a brake-shoe core

Cooley’s cost-saving cores also serve vendors

Building on an idea from automotive parts manufacturers, who often give customers a break on the cost of new parts when provided with the old ones that they can turn around and rebuild, Denise Cooley of the Supply Operations section of the ITD District 6 office in Rigby came up with an innovation that not only saves costs for the department but also is a customer-service improvement.

“Here at ITD, we often didn’t have the old parts – starters, fuel pumps, etc. – because they were in the field,” Cooley explained. “So, we paid full price for the new parts and then sought credit for the old ones (cores) once we retrieved and delivered them. This required extra paperwork and shipping. Ultimately, it became an accounting nightmare."

Cooley, who purchases supplies for the local district, came up with the idea of a “cores bank,” so named because the cores are stored on pallets at the district yard and vendors remove them to allocated space at their facilities.

“I proposed to our vendors that they give us the cost reduction every time, and we would get them the cores when we could. They agreed, and the arrangement worked great, saving time and money, both for us and for the vendors.

“By allowing ITD to store the cores, our vendors enable us to free up valuable warehouse space for them,” Cooley said.

“These vendors also pick up the cores from us themselves every few weeks, saving us delivery costs.”

District 6 now gathers and stores the old parts until the vendors are ready for them.

Times 7 Focus: Ideally, these innovations will not live in a silo — they will be catalysts for ITD’s other district offices and work areas, and inspire duplication statewide. These innovations represent time and money-saving measures, process improvements, and customer-service efficiencies that are transferrable to other districts. In that spirit, if this innovation is something you’d like to adapt to your own district or work space, and you have any questions, please contact District 6's Denise Cooley at 6-5652.

 


Published 08-26-16