Annoying.....

One of my pet peeves in this business is suppliers that drop covers and don't notify dealers in a timely manner. They often decide to drop a leather or fabric and we don't get a notice for 30 to 60 days later. Meanwhile, you spend time with a customer helping them select a cover, they make the decision to order and its written up and submitted. Two to five days later as the order works its way through the system the dealer gets a phone call that the cover is no longer available. Then the dealer has to call the customer and tell them - and about half the time they simply cancel the order, rather than re-select. This is lose-lose-lose for everyone and its very frustrating. That's one reason I like to call in to check cover status on every order right at time of order, but that can't be done on Saturdays - and a lot of orders are written on Saturdays. It happened again today on a Bradington Young order, just got an email from them that the series has been dropped and will be announced at Market (2 weeks from now). Lot of good that does us. They all do it, every maker. In today's digital age, how hard would it be to have a real-time website for dealers to check cover availability? It surely couldn't be that costly to implement. They already have computerized stocks available to their Customer Service people, they just need a module to put them to a secure website so we dealers could check.

I guess such a System would have to actually be a Configurator in that some "Drops" may be for Married Covers devoted to a particular piece / style. In other words the Leather could be dropped, but the on-hand varries by particular piece. Unless a "Drop" always means the last inventoried leather has already been built on any and all styles. I'm not familiar with the typical discontinuation flow, but would think its not binary or simply available vs. no longer available. I am familiar with real-time inventory systems and complex configurators and know it can be a lot more difficult then it would appear. In any case hope notification can improve as it is not at all enjoyable to risk disappointing or even loosing a customer.