Some Background
A small group from my final assembly team worked late into the night and we still didn’t get one our most important orders out the door. Dejected and exhausted, I told everyone to go home. We would try again tomorrow, but no one acknowledge me at they shuffled out the door.
After tonight, if someone is not aware how bad our due date performance is and the size of the problem they must have their head in the sand. Missing due dates is a reoccurring pattern for us and many customers have lost trust in us. Some have not ordered from us in a long time. The orders we do deliver, we deliver late and pay liquidated damages for being late. We are almost paying our customers to take our products away.
Our customers have their own production schedules to meet. When a key supplier delivers late, rescheduling their shop will be necessary. By rescheduling, priorities must be changed to what they can work on. Sometimes crews have to be moved from one location to another; this take time. Subcontractors have to be sent away and may not be available when you need them again. Equipment usage goes down since a machine, or a whole line of machines, needs to be set-up for something else. And, if they are anything like us, their Finance department complains about the higher work in process and take on more working capital debt.
I get it, the same thing happens to us. When our suppliers deliver late, we have even less time to deliver a quality product on time. Do we cut corners which may come back as higher service costs in the future? Do we have to work overtime and cut into the already thin margins? Answers I know and keep to myself. I still have to find a way out of this mess.
It’s time we decide on what the meaning of a good solution to our project management problems is. The trick will be to make sure the solution prevents any new problems to surface. The cure can’t be worse than the pain we are in now. All we need to do to is define the criteria for a good solution and show the value of each criterion. It sounds simple, but we need to be able to see the solution when we find it.
But, I was interrupted by a phone call. On the phone was one of our long time customers. To say he was upset was an understatement. It was his order we didn’t get out the door last night. All I could do was practice my empathy skills and feel the speaker explode in my ear. I’ve been friends with this guy for a long time. He calmed down, apologized and left me with nothing to say. Never the less, I asked him to meet me for lunch. I needed to find a way to repair our working relationship.
A Most Important Lunch
After we ordered lunch, I asked my friend what we needed to do to keep his business. I was surprised by his straightforward answer. It came in three parts––first, deliver your projects on time, every time. This is the only way to restore our company’s trust in yours. Second, continue to deliver the quality product we’ve become accustomed to. We also appreciate your good customer service and competitive pricing. Third, keep the first two things going over the long term.
Is that all, I asked. He didn’t take it as a joke. His gaze continued to bore into my soul and I could see how serious he was. He smiled. That’s when I realized it was our friendship that saved our company from disaster. He was giving me one more chance. I wasn’t going to let him down. I was also doing it for myself and the 250 other people back at the plant.
On my way back to the office, I started to prepare the speech to my staff about what I committed to. I better be well prepared because I’m sure they’ve had enough of my antics to improve our situation over the years. I hope they will listen one more time.