Ishiguro Shoten installs an IBM System/38 and builds a distribution centre (1983)

Matching on turnover an opponent you cannot match on cost

As far as Aomori a wholesaler would replenish goods piece by piece; across the water it would not. No amount of selling closed that gap for Ishiguro Shoten. Faced with higher sales and lower profit in 1983, management moved not on purchase prices but on how stock was held. Pooling every store's orders into a System/38 and gathering inspection, price-marking and delivery into a distribution centre doubled the rate at which stock turned. It can be read as a decision to draw level, on the speed at which goods move, with an opponent it was losing to on cost.

It took time to bite. More than two years passed before the system was mastered, and through them the difference in buying terms against the mainland remained. Seventh place in the trade in the year to February 1989 made it a strong company in Hokkaido, not a national leader, and the claim to have become the most advanced retailer around was the assessment of a president on the eve of taking his company public. Even so, the choice management made was to hold ordering and inventory on its own side of the counter, rather than to thin the range down to whatever the wholesalers' terms allowed.