"On Backorders": One Manufacturer's Take


Posted on Jul 8, 2009
By Luke Pfeifle

Every once in a while we all receive a notice from a catalog house or website that our order has been backordered.  Why does this happen?  As a manufacturer of dog toys let me give you an example of one of the many things that could cause a delay in our supply chain.

My Good Dog makes both Vibram rubber toys (at our plant in Massachusetts) and polyester squeaker toys (at a factory in Santiago, Dominican Republic) many of which are found here on the Fetchdog site.

 

Now when most people think of the DR they think of the beach resorts in Punta Cano or Puerto Plato, and when I tell them I'm going down to the DR to work they picture me lounging around in the Caribbean as the picture suggests.  This is hardly the case.

Santiago is a third world city of 800,000 people up in the mountains forty miles from the north coast of the DR.  We ship the fabric we use for the squeaker toys (we use remnants of the same fabric used by companies such as Nike and Adidias in their footwar uppers as a way to help the environment) down to a warehouse in a "free zone" in Santiago,  Then with proper documentation we dole out, as needed, fabric to the factory we work with which is outside of the free zone.  Well the other day, after two weeks of delays in making our latest toy order it came out that there weren't production problems, but that the warehouse had misplaced the documentation necessary to get the fabric released from the free zone.  The warehouse was too embarrassed to tell us, and the factory didn't want to say anything to embarrass the warehouse.  Finally, we got to the bottom of the problem, duplicate documents were sent, face was saved all around, fabric was released, and the factory made our toys in record time.

In this case, Fetchdog won't have to send out backorder notices, but it was a close call, and it was no day at the beach.  But that reminds me... now where did I put my bathing suit?

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