MSC Indirect

Pretend MSC is a giant playground.

The playground has lots of rides. A slide, a swing, a ball pit, a snack bar. Before MSC Indirect, every ride needed its own wristband. You had to go to five different windows to get five different wristbands. It was a lot of waiting.

Now there is one wristband. You show it to the nice lady at the front gate. She smiles. Every ride knows you. If the snack bar runs out of cookies, the slide finds out too, because they all share the same big whiteboard. That's City Hall.

The biggest toy book you've ever seen.

Imagine a picture book with two and a half million different things in it. Drills, gloves, screws, bandages, brooms, safety goggles. For the book to work, every single toy gets exactly one page. One photo. One price. One "we have it in stock" sticker.

If you had ten copies of the book on ten shelves, they would all start to disagree. Ten prices. Ten photos. Chaos. MSC Indirect keeps one book. Everyone reads the same page.

Five giant toy warehouses.

Picture a warehouse as big as eleven football fields, full of tiny bins. MSC has five of those. When you order a drill bit online, a helper in the closest warehouse gets a little beep on their scanner.

Three or four helpers grab different pieces of your order at the same time. Conveyor belts carry all the pieces to a special marrying room, where they meet in one box. A robot tucks in the packing slip and the crinkly pillow, seals the lid, and sends it down the correct slide for the right truck. By breakfast time.

The truck brain.

Every day thousands of boxes leave the five warehouses. Some ride with the brown truck. Some ride with the big honking 18 wheeler. Some ride in their very own trailer, all alone.

The Truck Brain picks the right truck for each box. Which one is cheapest? Which one gets there tomorrow? Can we still promise next day? Where is the truck right now? All of that, decided in a blink, before you even click the "buy" button.

The grown up money room.

Every time someone orders something, sends a bill, or gets paid, the Treasury writes it down. If the warehouse is the city's muscles and the website is the city's face, the Treasury is its big accountant brain. It never forgets a dollar.

Big companies that buy from MSC have their own money rooms too. Some of those rooms are called SAP. MSC Indirect's Treasury speaks to their Treasuries. Politely. In writing. Every day.

The price answerer.

One drill bit does not have one price. Joe at the corner shop pays one price. A giant car factory pays less, because they buy thousands. The government pays a special government price. Who you are decides what you pay.

The Pricemakers Guild is a tiny room with a big rulebook. Every time anyone in the city needs to know "what does this person pay for this thing today?", they ask the Guild. Nobody invents a price on their own.

The "how much?" window.

Sometimes a customer wants something weird. Like 5,000 of a very special drill bit that isn't in the normal book. They walk up to the How Much Window and ask, politely: "How much?"

The room phones the supplier, asks the Pricemakers, adds a fair little bit of profit, and slides a piece of paper back under the window with a number on it. That piece of paper has a fancy name. It's called an RFQ, which is grown up for "how much."

The big proposal book.

Sometimes a huge customer doesn't just want one price. They want a whole book. The book has to explain: "Can you keep our factory full of supplies for three years? How fast? How much? Who answers the phone at 2am when something breaks?"

That book is called an RFP. Winning one can mean millions of dollars. Today, writing the book takes six people and four weeks. Inside MSC Indirect, the book mostly writes itself from all the live numbers in the city.

The city's memory of every friend.

MSC has a huge team of grown ups whose whole job is to be friendly with customers. When they call a customer, they want to remember everything. What did the customer buy last month? Is their vending machine running out of anything? Did we send a price yesterday? Who is the kind person on their side who picks up the phone?

Salesforce Tower is the tall building that remembers all of that. One friend, one dashboard, one story. No more "let me check three different computers and call you back."

Shopping from your own lemonade stand.

Pretend you have a lemonade stand. Your mom says: "If you want to buy anything, use my wallet, because I track every penny." Fair enough.

One day you want a special toy from the MSC Toy Shop. You don't want to leave your lemonade stand. So MSC Indirect does a magic trick. It lets you walk into the MSC Toy Shop from inside your lemonade stand. You pick out toys. You come back. Your mom's wallet approves. The toys show up. Grown ups call this trick PunchOut. The secret language the two sides use is called cXML.

The snack machine that sells drill bits.

You know those snack machines with the curly wires and the spinning rings? Pretend there's one, but instead of candy, it has drill bits and safety glasses. Pretend it lives inside a big factory. Pretend it's open all night long.

A worker walks up at 2 in the morning, swipes a badge, and the machine spits out a drill bit. The machine knows. Every bit counts. When it gets low, it calls home in its sleep and asks for a refill. By breakfast, a brand new box lands on the factory loading dock. Customers who use this save 15 to 50 cents of every dollar they used to spend. That's huge.

The magic shaky hammer.

Milling machines cut metal. When they shake the wrong way, they make ugly parts and break their own teeth. Most shops try to fix the shaking by guessing. Slow down. Speed up. Try again.

MSC found a better way. A scientist brings out a tiny hammer with a sensor inside. They tap the tool, once, like a triangle in music class. The hammer feels how the tool shakes. A computer figures out the one magic speed where it doesn't shake. Then the machine cuts twice as fast. Sometimes twelve times as fast. The lab is called MillMax. It came from the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Yes, the actual government science lab.

The grown ups who've been doing this since before you were born.

When a customer cannot figure out why their metal is tearing instead of cutting cleanly, they call the Academy. Over 100 experts pick up the phone. Sometimes the problem takes a ten minute chat. Sometimes an expert flies out. Once, an expert swapped in a better tool that did in one pass what the old one took forty passes to do. That's the kind of help lives here.

The part of the city anyone can walk into.

Not every customer is a giant factory. Some are a single grown up with their own little shop. Some are curious people learning how to make things. The Public Square is the part of MSC Indirect that smiles at everybody.

It has a shop (the website). It has a library full of free how to guides. It has a drawing viewer so engineers can share secret plans safely. All under one roof.

The customers with the strictest rules.

Some customers are very big. Enormous car factories. The United States government. State and city offices. Military bases. They have the strictest rules. Who can visit. What the price may be. How fast things must ship. Where the parts come from. What reports need to be filed.

The Federal Wing keeps all those extra rules in one place, so the rest of the city doesn't trip over them.

The "made here" corner.

MSC sells other people's tools, mostly. But it also makes its own tools under its own brand names. One brand is called Accupro. The house brand costs a little less than the famous brands but works just as well. Everyone wins.

There's also a small but growing 3D printing corner. Instead of cutting a part out of a metal block, a printer builds the part up, tiny layer by tiny layer, until a whole part appears. Like magic. Slow magic.