Van stock is the real inventory
For most plumbing businesses the central warehouse is a staging area and the vans are where the work happens. A part sitting in a warehouse bin does nothing for a customer whose boiler has failed; a part in the van that is at their door does. Inventory that only describes the warehouse describes the wrong place.
The practical consequence is that each vehicle needs its own stock level, its own minimums and its own restock list. A van that starts the day loaded to a known level and finishes it with a list of what was used is a very different operation from one that is topped up by feel.
It also changes how you see the whole business. When every van is a location, a question like whether another vehicle has a particular valve is a lookup rather than a series of phone calls, and a rarely used but expensive part can live in one place instead of being duplicated in every vehicle.
- Create a location for each vehicle as well as for the warehouse
- Set a minimum level per vehicle for the parts that stop a job
- Restock from a list of what fell below minimum, not from memory
- Keep slow-moving expensive parts in one place and look them up when needed
The long tail of small parts
A plumber carries hundreds of low-value items: compression fittings, olives, washers, PTFE tape, clips, flexible connectors, isolation valves. Individually they cost almost nothing. Collectively, running out of the wrong one is what turns a thirty-minute job into a half-day one.
Trying to count every washer is a reliable way to make the team abandon the system. A more workable approach separates the items into two groups. A small number of parts stop the job when missing, and these are tracked with a minimum level. The rest are replenished from a visual check or a bulk reorder on a regular cycle.
Bin labels with barcodes or QR codes make the tracked group quick to handle. Scanning the label of the parts taken for a job takes seconds, and it is fast enough that people actually do it. Anything slower than that will be skipped by the busiest people first.
Parts used on jobs, and parts brought back
Two movements are easy to lose: parts consumed on a job, and parts returned to stock afterwards. Consumption that is not recorded means the van count drifts away from reality until the next stocktake corrects it. Returns that are not recorded mean good parts sit in a box in the back of the van, counted as gone.
The discipline is small: record what was used at the time, and record what came back when it comes back. What makes it sustainable is that the recording is a scan or a quick entry, not a form to fill in at the end of the day from memory.
Periodic counts of each van catch what slips through. A short cycle count of a vehicle, done when it is in the yard, is far less disruptive than a full annual stocktake and keeps the numbers honest between them.
Ordering from merchants and suppliers
Plumbing businesses typically buy from a handful of merchants and wholesalers, often on account, with same-day collection as the fallback when something runs out. That fallback is convenient and expensive: it costs a driver, fuel and time, and it usually happens at the worst moment.
Reorder alerts based on minimum levels move that decision earlier. The list of what is low across warehouse and vans becomes the order, placed with the merchant in one go, rather than a string of emergency trips.
Keeping supplier and cost information against each item also means that when prices change, or when a part is discontinued, you can see which items and which vans are affected. The stock system becomes a reference for purchasing as well as a count.
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