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'Pull' System Aids In Emergency Reponse

Suffolk, Virginia; April 28, 2008

On the Monday afternoon of April 28, the southeastern tip of Virginia experienced a strong tornado running through Suffolk and running northeast toward Norfolk. The tornado skipped along the ground for about 25 miles, touching down in several places.

Our Alliance Partner, Dominion Power, was immediately on the scene to begin the tedious job of restoring the power to those homes that could accept it, completing the job over the course of the next two days.

We contacted them the morning after the storms and assured them that we would be watching their transformer usage closely and would be prepared to replenish their usage quickly. Fortunately, Dominion is on our pull inventory management scheme and provides us with inventory status of each transformer style at each of their 35 locations. We could see each morning their consumption. We quickly recognized that they were not using large quantities of transformers. We also recognized that they had moved about 40 transformers from their central warehouse to the affected areas at their service centers at Suffolk and Norfolk.

Fortunately, Dominion had increased their inventory target inventory levels to their higher summer levels just a few weeks prior to this event. We had responded and had completed getting all of their accounts up to their new summer levels just the prior week, including restocking their main warehouse in Richmond which they empty during the winter.

On Friday morning, our ABB sales person discussed with them their immediate needs and confirmed that they had sufficient inventory on hand to respond to their immediately needs. We waited one more business day, until Monday, May 5, to work up the truckloads to replenish the accounts. We sent a half truckload to Suffolk and another half truckload to Norfolk to fill those yards back to the desired inventory levels. We also sent nearly a full truckload to the main warehouse in Richmond to fill those shelves back to normal. In less than 2 weeks, our pull inventory system had allowed us to monitor their usage, discuss with them their needs that might not have been shown in the values we were seeing, and refilled their accounts back to the levels prior the tornado. This is the level of customer service that has made this customer very satisfied with Power Partners.