Start from consumption per bench-week, not from last year’s annual spend
A procurement manager at a contract lab called me in March because her monthly PTFE order had gone from 40 packs to 140 packs in six weeks, and nobody could tell her whether that was a demand change or a counting error. It was neither. A method transfer had moved three extraction benches onto 47 mm, 0.45 µm PTFE discs, and the consumption rate had stepped up 3.5x in a single week. Her reorder point was still set on the old number, so the ERP kept releasing emergency buys at the minimum orde...
