Our battery supply chain is starting to show some kinks. We’ve had surprisingly smooth sailing through the pandemic until recently. In Q4, our supply chain started to show some kinks. Plan your battery purchases in advance for the coming quarters!
- Trojan and other large lead acid batteries – Our local distributor ran out of the most common Trojan batteries – part numbers like T105 and T125 – in late December and early January. They have been able to cover orders with US Battery equivalents. For long time customers, they remember US Battery, because that was our lead brand when we had a brick and mortar store. Disruptions are happening both at the manufacturing and trucking/distribution levels. Our distributor advises us they see supply disruptions across the entire industry for the next several quarters. They are responding by extending their order window to manufacturers up to 9 months out. While commercial customers often wait until their batteries totally fail in applications like pallet jacks and floor scrubbers, for the first half of 2021. We encourage you to consider ordering deep cycle batteries in advance of them causing operations disruptions for your business.
- Energizer Industrial alkaline batteries – Our distributor started to have difficulty getting Energizer Industrial alkaline batteries in November. This delayed shipments about a month. Plus as some of you know, our distributor emptied their shelves of sleeves to fulfill case orders. Fortunately, we already were maintaining buffer stock for our repeat customers of about 2 months, so we have had no customer delivery disruptions. Now, we’ve increased our buffer stock to 3 months. Still, we encourage our Energizer Industrial alkaline battery customers to order early through the second quarter.
Jim Logan
PGH Batteries
724-741-6200
[email protected]
PGHBatteries.comhttps://pghbatteries.com
