Today was mostly meetings. That means I have little to write about.

One of the meetings was “Next week we will tell you what you have to do for plant-wide physical inventory.” That’s great. Next week I am not in this state. So let me ask some questions. “We are still working on that. Next week we will have it figured out.”

My boss wants to know either today or tomorrow where this late shipment analyisis is going. I told him I hadn’t had much time to work on it. So within the next 30 minutes he gave me something to do all day Thursday and Friday. Okay. But now please don’t ask me where my project is going, because you already made that decision.

We also had a meeting where we asked the customer service folks, the ones who answer phones and talk to customers, not to expedite orders that don’t need to be expedited. And then we (by “we” I mean my boss because I didn’t know what he was going to commit us to today until he did it) promised that for every order we would do everything we could do to find a way to ship it. No, not every order; about 80 to 90% of the expedites that I see.

An example would be checking for the necessary item or component as contained in some other item. On our system, this means using one screen to run the list of where the item could be used. This will include items that are hardly ever or never made. Oddly, it will also almost always include the same item several times. I am not quite sure why. But you must mentally drop the duplicates out, or repeat your work. You need to use a different screen to check whether there are any of these various items actually in stock.

If I am going to do that for 80% of my expedites, that pretty well takes care of my flexible time. But I have the lightest load of expedites of anyone on the team. I don’t know what my team-members were thinking when our boss said we would do this for most expedites, but I can guess. I wish he had asked our opinion before he promised it publically to everybody.