Supply Chain Recovery Showing Sustained Improvement

Boyden Moore, Orgill’s president and CEO, shared a couple pieces of good news during the hardware distributor’s ‘2022 Fall Buying Event.’ “First of all, we are beginning to see sustained improvement in our supply chain recovery. Demand has moderated from the incredibly high levels that we experienced last year and many of our vendors have improved their performance to us that has led to this sustained improvement,” he said. This has been its “number one” focus and will remain so until it is fully recovered to its traditional standards of service level of over 96 per cent. It expects to end the year above 85 per cent and is working with vendors on plans to close the remaining gap during the first half of 2023. “As frustrating as the past couple of years have been, we’re encouraged by the progress we’re seeing now and are more confident than ever in our path back to our standards,” he said. The second piece of good news he shared was on inflation and pricing. After experiencing the highest number of price changes from its vendors and in the market in 2021, it is now seeing much lower numbers for price change requests and some of these changes are now even decreasing prices. Inflation is also moderating broadly with the Consumer Price Index, up 8.5 per cent over the prior year in July, which was lower than June’s 9.1 per cent increase. “Most economists are expecting continued declines in the rate of inflation throughout the remainder of this year and a return to lower levels of inflation in 2023,” he said.