You may recall that in an earlier issue I covered the idea that information is as important an asset to your company as is its inventory. Most readers of this column, historically, have been responsible for the receipt, transportation, storage, and quality of the materials (inventory) under their roofs.

Now, like it or not, (believe it or not) you already are or will become responsible for information about the materials that you handle. In the day-to-day challenges of keeping materials flowing to support manufacturing or to make shipments to the supply channel serving your ultimate customers, that responsibility can be overlooked.

It also is important for you to understand what this responsibility involves because, as we have all learned, responsibility is not important until something bad happens.

The big problem is that you may have been given responsibility that you did not consciously know you were accepting. Therefore you may not be staffed, budgeted, or equipped to manage that responsibility. So how can you know if you are prepared? Perhaps the good news is that managing the information may not be your responsibility and the people in information services may be taking care of it (or so you think and so you are told until a problem arises).

Yet, whether responsibility for information is up to you or someone else, it might be a good idea to ask a few questions of yourself or others.

You can ask the same questions about handling information that you would about handling inventory. Below I've listed 12 questions that will sound familiar because they apply to good inventory handling practices. I just replaced the word "inventory" with "information."

• How careful are you about the quality of information?
• How efficiently do you handle information?
• How easy is it to "see" the information that you should have?
• How often is information turned? Is FIFO (first in/first out) important?
• As far as aging goes, do you manage "A", "B" and "C" information?
• Are you capable of using information that may be "on hand" in other branches or at suppliers or customers?
• How good are you at drawing information from various locations together to form a "kit"–that is, a new report, essentially, or a function that automatically causes action?
• Do you have specialists on your staff that are familiar with the latest techniques used to receive, store, track, and transfer information?
• How will the quality, quantity, validity and location of information be audited?
• Are you capable of providing controlled visibility of your information to suppliers, customers, and other facilities?
• Do you have the capability to use inventory and shipment information from suppliers to make the operation more efficient?
• Can you act as an "information warehouse" for your customers to help them to manage information or to manage it more efficiently?

The only problem with all of these questions is that someone can respond to them with a simple "yes" or "no." I might suggest that if you use the list, that for any "yes" answer you ask "how?" and for any "no" reply you ask "why?"