There are several practical strategies you can use to ensure reliable heating oil supplies.
You will find knowledge of these handy if, for instance, you are managing a factory where this type of oil product is used to fuel boilers. In that case, ensuring reliable oil supplies would be one of your management priorities. That is because if the supplies are interrupted due to management problems, your manufacturing enterprise can grind to a halt unless you have an alternative mechanism you can use to keep the boilers running.
If you are managing the manufacturing enterprise on behalf of other people, you can be sure that the real owners of the venture would be breathing down your neck upon learning that you have let its operations grind to a halt on account of heating oil supply issues. Simply put, this is one of the things you have a lot of control over as a manager, and it would be pretty much inexcusable for it to be the cause of your enterprise’s stalling.
Some of the strategies you can use to ensure reliable heating oil supplies would include:
Maintaining relations with multiple vendors at once. This way, in case one vendor fails to deliver on an order, you just turn to the other ones, to ensure that you never run out of oil. The alternative situation would be one where you get all your oil from a single supplier.
If, for whatever reason, that supplier can’t meet an order, and you have to start looking for new suppliers, vetting them, making orders to them and waiting for them to deliver, you’d probably end up in a mess. For if you are initiating the whole process after your oil supplies have gone below the reorder level, chances are that you’ll end up with absolutely no oil by the time new supplies by the newly identified vendors are brought in.
By this time, of course, your operations would have ground to a halt. But your fixed costs would, in the meantime, still be accumulating. And the investors would, in all probability, be breathing fire and brimstone!
Paying your suppliers in good time always. This would in turn make them feel some sort of obligation to ensure that they deliver your oil orders in good time as well. We tend to get what we give. If you turn out to be problematic in your payments, the suppliers are also likely to become problematic in their deliveries: as they focus more of their energies on serving the ‘better’ customers. It is tough, but it is the reality.
Selecting your heating oil suppliers carefully. If you are keen on getting reliable heating oil supplies, you’d be better off opting for well established suppliers with multiple supply chains backing each other up. That way, the probably of all stacked supply chains failing simultaneously would be very low indeed.
Making an effort to keep your suppliers generally happy. Simply put, if the suppliers perceive you as a customer who respects them and their businesses, they tend to sense an obligation to give your orders priority treatment, even when there are shortages.
Making fresh oil orders in good time. This would help you avoid those utterly inexcusable situations where you let the heating oil stocks run out completely, before replenishing them. The advantage with timely orders is in the fact that they give you time allowance to make alternative arrangements for heating oil procurement, in case the suppliers to whom such orders are given are unable to deliver. But last minute home heating oil Belfast orders are much harder to deal with: as they give you no ‘breathing space.’
