“I recently was reading a Supply Chain Daily.com article that referenced an Article in Metal Miner by Lisa Reisman 1960’s comparison of the steel mill actions of today. (Editor’s Note, here is the link to that post entitled Steel Industry Musings from the 1960 Recession) I loved it! I did a similar comparison although not as in depth as Lisa's, mine was just a 5-year trend. The actions were not much different in what happened in both demand and pricing. In several discussions with my CFO we tossed around the notion of the mills might be playing with collusion during these desperate times. I then came across “The Commodity Bulls are Back in Town—A Return to Commodity Price Inflation an article by Jason Busch from Spend Matters. It even referenced a white paper on the events of possible collusion evidence from the late 19th Century Basque Iron and Steel Industry. I guess you could say the steel industry is both cyclical and predictable by their past actions during economic turmoil.
Over the past 18 months I have introduced my company to historical trend analysis in both our own sales data along with commodities that impact our business. “They’re hooked”! You might think that this would be the norm but this was not the case. Profit and sales backlog dollars were the main focus of any historical tracking. By collecting this data and analyzing the trends we were able to make better decisions and subsequently we were able to decrease cost and inventory which increased cash flow."