Three Weeks Later
“At this rate, we’re not going to be able to keep up with all the quotes we are getting,” said Alice.
Alice is a short, petite woman. She started with the company as an assembler in our electronic circuit board department. She made it on to Jacques staff through hard work and the clear desire to help the company succeed. That was almost five years ago and she’s been in charge of the quotation department ever since.
She said, “I don’t know what’s happening, but we’ve had to work overtime and I’ve come in on the past two Saturdays to try and keep on top of things. We can’t do this forever.” She put her hands on her lap and looked down at the table. Her frustration was clear to everyone. I saw it, too.
Jacques invited me to his staff meeting because he’s taken me under his wing, so to speak. With all the traveling we’ve done together and the many sales meetings we’ve conducted, we’ve got to know each other very well. He isn’t the jerk I thought him to be. I’m not the crazy project manager he thought I was.
I said, “What companies are these quotes coming from?”
She read them off and I was not surprised to hear the names. They were the same companies Jacques and I had visited. I know we got good responses to our new offer, but I didn’t know we got more quotes from them. My prediction was that the sales hit rate would go up, but I didn’t know when or how much.
The systems we sell are unique. Every customer wants an up to date quotation even if it for things they’ve ordered before. Alice must create a response to a customer RFP from scratch each time. I didn’t know much about the process she uses, but it’s starting to look like a small project. Each quote has many steps and the work is handled by more than one person.
Alice said, “It wouldn’t be so bad if customers were willing to wait for us. But, I’m getting a few phone calls, only a few so far, asking when their quote will be back to them.”
Jacques said, “We have a small window of opportunity to get back in with some old customers. We have to get the quotes back as soon as we can.”
Jacques was pushing them hard, but I could see his point. We weren’t out fo the wood yet. We needed to close more and more deals to capitalize on the hard work we put into re-organizing my operations.
But, my operations under the same pressures at one time. Each order has many steps and the work is handled by more than one person. Our customers complained about how long it took for us to deliver an order. When we did deliver, it was usually late. We were working overtime and Saturdays. I even came in on Sundays from time to time.
I said, “We are in uncharted territory here. I’m not sure how much more capacity we need to process quotes today or next week. But, I do know that when we looked at the work in operations, we exposed all the capacity we needed and more.”
Jacques said, “Do you think the solution you used to expose capacity could reduce the time it takes to process our quotations?”
I said, “I don’t see why not, but we can check. It’s obvious to me that there are common tasks for every quote even if the details are unique. These tasks have a general duration of flow. It takes more than one resource to process all the tasks. And, there is a lot of uncertainty about many things Alice needs to deal with. If an environment, in this case, the quote department, has these characteristics, the solution we’ve used should be good fit.”
Jacques said, “Do you have time to sit with Alice and come to a firm conclusion?”
I said, “How about I send Jim, one of my best project mangers, over to meet with Alice? He’s not busy right now and has been on the road the past few weeks. He’ll be glad to work on an internal project for a change.”
The meeting continued through the rest of the agenda items and then broke up. I returned to my office and saw the CEO sitting behind my desk. It wasn’t my desk exactly, it was his company after all. But, I still didn’t like it.
He pushed some papers around and clamp his hands together. He looked up. Not surprised to see me. His face was passive. A lump of grey, sagging clay. His eyes were small, brown dots underneath his huge forehead. I looked into them and imagining the small child inside start to shrink. I continued to shrink until I was so small that he had to strain to see me. If I could have disappeared, I would have, but I could only shrink so far. It look all the energy I had to stand there and wait.
He said, “We lost another order today. Why did it take a call to the CEO of the Klinester Corporation to beg him to reconsider? Don’t you know we are trying everything to get them back as a customer? What kind of show are you running here anyway?”
In my shrunken state, the drone of his words echoed in my head. I was in a deep, dark hole where every sound reverberated off one side then the other. No word was distinguishable. I couldn’t make sense of anything I was hearing. I didn’t want to. It hurt. Anymore words that got into my head would explode.
I was aware of my breathing only because I was running out of air. Breathing was hard. It scared me more than the exploding words. I started to panic and felt myself become light headed. Ah, relief. My lightheadedness gave way to euphoria. I was flying. Floating higher and higher. Free. Silent.
I opened my eyes and was standing in front of my desk again. The CEO was sitting there looking at me. Waiting. Waiting for what?
He said, “What are you doing about these customers who want their order faster?”
My breathing back to normal, I said, “How much faster to they want there orders?”
He said, “You have to cut your lead times in half. That should do it.”
I said, “OK, I can do that.” How in the hell was I going to do that?
He said, “Get it done and start with the Klinester order.”
He rose from my desk. My chair hit the wall with a clang and the wheels rattled. His bulk pulled a vacuum from the space behind my desk and I saw some of my papers move. I heard a whoosh of air as he moved towards me. Moving aside I let him by me and caught a whiff of cologne. My eyes started to water. Or, were those tears. As I blinked, he faded off into the distance.
I sat in one of my guest chairs and continued to take deep breaths. Dazed. That was a close call. I hope he didn’t notice. My childhood memories of being berated by my father appeared out of nowhere like all my memories do. I was a small child being traumatized by the one person I depended on for my survival. I had nowhere to go. No way to defend myself. But, I learned to protect myself by shrinking in place. My safe place.
What a morning. There is preliminary evidence that our reliability offer was generating more quotations. And, if my hunch was right, we could find more capacity for Alice’s department by include her in our CCPM solution. More quotes doesn’t always mean more orders. But, the increase in quote activity is the early warning I need to make sure we do everything we can to turn the quotes into orders.
But now the CEO wants to deliver orders faster, not only on time. We would have to maintain our due date performance, of course, but now orders deliver in less time than the industry standard. By half.