It's a Tournament of Champions. Everything is on the line: money, prestige, bragging rights, fame and fortune. Commercial interests have weighed in with money, people, attention, hype. Loyalties and feelings are extreme. The build up is intense and the eyes of the world zoom in to watch.

No, it's not The Masters, The World Series, The Super Bowl or even Missouri vs. Kansas. It's a dog show.

But what a show. Officially called The Westminster Kennel Club Annual Dog Show, 2009 was the 133rd. But to dog people – and they are a breed apart – it's just The Garden.

For The Garden this year, there were 2,522 dogs from 49 states, the District of Columbia and at least seven foreign countries.

At the end of two days, one dog was deemed "Best In Show." This year it was a rather unusual breed called a Sussex Spaniel, officially named Ch Clussexx Three D Grinchy Glee, who answers to "Stump."

Of greater interest was his age, just past 10 years, the oldest winner ever. That is a big upper for someone like me, a Baby Boomer on the down slope from 50.

What, you might wonder, does this have to do with the price of bearings? Good question. I think the whole logic behind the showing of dogs has a lot to do with business and with life.

A dog show is not, like the NCAA Basketball Tourney, a win/lose competition. One dog breed does not compete with another in the way teams do. How else could you compare a Chihuahua (ideal size: must weigh less than six pounds) to a Great Dane (males must be at least 30 inches at the shoulders.)

You can't. But winning dogs are based on being the best example of that particular breed. The one dog that the judges choose to be the best of the best is the one that trots off with the awards and the prestige.

So, it's not just the US Army that preaches "be the best that you can be."

That ties in with business with a simple lesson: any situation can be made as good as can be. IBT's integrated supply chain services can help.

Any organization is constantly challenged to maximize productivity. That push for productivity can lead to important but less urgent things falling through the cracks. As a result, the press of today penalizes the importance of tomorrow.

When IBT's Integrated Services Group (ISG) comes to a potential new job site, one of the first places we look is the storeroom. These are rarely clean and well-lit places, but the level of disorder and near chaos allows ISG to figure out just what we need to do first.

Typically, we'll find usable goods that are ready to go to work. But mixed in with them, we'll also find a variety of miscellaneous stuff; some of it outright junk. Some of it might have been there for years – to fix equipment long scrapped. Who knows? Generally, no one has sorted the usable from the questionable.

So, almost always, we start to clean it up, sort it out, organize the parts, separate the usable from the marginal, get rid of the out and out junk for whatever salvage money we can get for the customer, and figure out how to sell off the usable goods that are no longer needed at the job site.

But regardless of what we find in the storeroom, we always clean it from top to bottom. We put in shelving, if required. We identify everything, label it and bar code properly. We organize the stock, clean up the place and paint what needs to be painted.

The before and after is clearly evident. But the changes are more than just appearance. There is an organization, a logic, an order. We now know what we have – and we control what goes in and what comes out.

Although this storeroom's function has suffered because of the demand for productivity, the new arrangement improves productivity. With the right components and parts on the shelf, the MRO people at the worksite can make repairs without waiting to find – or in some of the messes – not find that part they know is on hand.

So we make the non-glamorous storeroom into a working, useful, valuable, productive place. We match the form to the function and make it work for its living. And that, I assure you, is something to bark proudly about.

Give me a whistle if you are interested in learning more about how ISG can get your storeroom out of the dog house.