We have a phrase at Acme tool company that I suppose they have at many companies: “It’s all about the customer.”

Since anyone can say “customer focused,” we better ought to have a look at what it really means. Imagine then that you are a potential customer of my company. As such, you might first hear about my company’s products from someone who works in Marketing. If you decide that you would like to buy our products and you would be a significant source of business for us, someone from Sales will work with you to make all the order arrangements. The salesperson will probably take care of booking your initial order, but after that you will work with someone in Customer Service to place your orders.

If you have inquiries on an existing order, you would contact Customer Service and if they were not able to answer your question they would pass your request on to Order Management. Order Management would pass your request on to Planning. If Planning could not give a satisfactory answer the question might go back the buyers as to why we did not have the material in place for us to be able to build your order.

And the buyers might say that when the Marketing people got together in their meetings to decide what tools to sell to you, they had in front of them some pieces of paper that said this could be made and that could be bought, and all of that was well and good and sometimes true. But the Marketing people did not know the problems that frequently arise when you try to make this thing this way, or buy that thing from that person, so that although things may work according to the pieces of paper, they often don’t.

I have left out a great number of people, not even mentioning Engineers or Accountants or Workers, to say nothing of all their various Managers, but if you are like me you do not even want to have to deal with Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service. You want to talk to one person who can take care of your problem. So you may ask to speak with the Customer Service person’s manager; or if your list of contacts includes a seasoned veteran, in Sales let’s say, or even in Planning, you may go to them, and ask them to just take care of the problem for you.

Any veteran will know how to make sure something gets done, but whatever this worthy does on your behalf could have the effect of rolling a bowling ball through an elaborate maze of standing dominoes, so that dominoes go toppling in all directions. One way or another that crucial last domino will get toppled, but strings of dominoes will also run colliding into each other and running out into dead ends where the dominoes have already fallen.

But this is a diversion from my subject. Aren’t you, dear customer, glad that there is such an army of dominoes out there, all working on your behalf?

Acme Tool Co. still calls layoffs “reorganizations.” How lame. See how cool companies do it–compare two Google announcements.

Pay attention to the titles–this is CHANGE, people! Oh boy!

First engineers get changed, then People Operators (see signature) get changed. Shortchanged?

Of the two, I think I prefer the changes to the People Operators. It basically says, you’re fired, it sucks, sorry. The one for the engineers trys to explain it away and it scares me pretty bad when it says “Having offices distributed around the globe […] presented unique challenges. The most difficult of these being to […] provide engineers with significant, meaningful projects.” Meaning? We hired you and we didn’t even have any work for you to do! Man, I missed that gravy boat.

Welcome to the Pity Party. It’s easy to get in; no cover charge, just bring a complaint.

Problems we have legion. About a year ago the A-Team left, having brought with them a Mandate from Heaven which we were Not Allowed to Question and having left behind, in several incompatible versions, a process which added more time, touchpoints, and inventory to our build process. About four months later, in the throes of learning focus all of our efforts on meeting our first promise to the customer, we were given a stringent demand to improve in three months or face dire consequences. For months we learned, bit by bit, how each seemingly inconsequential part of our process affected the other parts. The total sum of our software idiosyncrasies gradually distilled into the only internally cohesive process we could fashion, and, as our deadline drew to a close and we met the goals established for us, senior leadership fired our plant manager. Then, after another month or two, they fired the man who had driven the plant manager to undertake all the painful changes.

Then they announced that we would go back to striving to meet the customer’s request rather than our first promise, as we had done two or three years ago before they began the ever-intensifiying push to meet our first promise. Most recently, it was announced that we would change our build process to resemble what it had been before the A-Team came to enlighten us all. Meanwhile the existing process is failing because they laid off the people who had been proficient in it and retained people who had not done it before.

Bookings have collapsed to about half of what they were a year ago but past-due orders have been decreasingly only fitfully, held up by unexpected sales of product we can’t build due to breakdown of equipment that we cannot replace or effectively repair. Other tools could be built but we do not have the capacity on the assembly line (which was two assembly lines before being efficiently combined by the A-Team) or enough people to bring the material to the line–at least people who can do so quickly, since those who were familiar with this line were laid off. Other tools can’t be built because, although planners have been admonished to make sure all material is available five days in advance of when it is needed, the new ship to customer request policy means that while you are holding four components in anticipation of a build (and possibly waiting for a fifth), any or all of the four could ship as spares to orders that come in requested the same day. Then you must call your supplier in Japan or England or China or Russia or India and inform them that your schedule from two months ago turned out to be incorrect, and you need some more parts no later than four days ago.

Meanwhile, we are probably going to switch suppliers for crucial raw materials back to a supplier we had years ago, whom everyone who was around then desperately hates due to their abysmal service at that time. But the people who make decisions now were not around then, and the supplier swears they will deliver on time, and at tremendous savings over their competitor. Another supplier went out of business and closed their doors with no prior warning, leaving us scrambling to find a replacement. But all is not bleak on the supply side: after years and years of poor service from one supplier, we are finally going to switch–if we can convince this notorious ne’er-do-well to give us back our tooling used to make our parts without paying exhorbitant service and maintenance fees.

This is how today went: First thing this morning, our Process Improvement expert (who was our key ambassador to the A-Team, and the one who reoriented the assembly lines how they were before, and just announced that we will use the process we were using before, and is the key person in giving all the reasons and data for how we will change things to meet our goals) called me over to ask question on how our inventory allocates to our sales orders. It turns out he did not understand how that process worked and had therefore used wrong assumptions to calculate safety stock levels. Consequently the plant has been doing an abysmal job attaining to the safety stock levels it has committed to. After that I went to a meeting that was not really a meeting; it was the evicserated remains of the meeting we used to have whereat the planners got together with the work leaders to finalize the plans for the day. Here unfortunately the planning manager expressed his general dissatisfaction with and lack of understanding of the decisions of his supervisors, with the resultant lack of understanding of what they were supposed to do and how they were supposed to achieve it. It was the type of meeting where you try to be invisible, but before it adjourned I had to inform the planning manager that one of the tasks for his group that I had tried to minimize I was told had to be done in an extensive fashion–although really I am not sure how it is supposed to be done at all, since a variety of hazy and contradictory messages have gone floating through the management level above me, leaving me uncertain if the task can even be done with the tool I have spent the last four months gradually refinining for this purpose.

Then I went to a second meeting, the reincarnation of the meeting we used to have where the plant manager asks his management team questions they are ill prepared to answer, they having been accustomed to the presence of their subordinates who know the details of the situations at this meeting. Here, the failure to build some tools was blamed on the lack of some parts; the person responsible for the constraint process said it was an exceptional failure lasting less than eight hours which would soon be resolved. The plant manager asked him why the parts were not ready five days in advance, as he has been insisting upon; and he has indeed repeated this frequently and clearly. This particular group of parts are reasonable easy and reliable to make, fairly expensive, and used in large quantities; the process manager had delivered exceptional inventory turnover (one of the metrics that had been stridently promoted in the recent past, and an overall cost saver) by running a just-in-time process that actually used a Kanban, or replenish when used, system, unlike other so-called Kanban “pull” systems that exist more in trendiness than reality.

The planning manger, still sour from earlier in the morning, obdurately pointed out that the safety stock number in the system was not maintained, and it was a mystery to him why. The manufacturing manager, who should have stood up for his subordinate, sat quiet while the plant manager cross-examined him, but responded forcefully to the planning manager’s accusatory implication, and was heard later in the day vowing “no more Mr. Nice Guy.” Without support, the person who had maintained an actual demand-driven, high-velocity process conceded and pledged to produce mountains of inventory so that we may never run out again.

A short while later, I caught the tail end of a meeting about how to maintain our safety stock levels under the influence of our allocation process, a follow-up to the conversation that started the day. The options on the table seemed to be either 1), build mountains of everything so that we can allocate a week’s worth of orders and still allocate any sudden demands that come in for same-day shipment, 2) let inventory that was built for a customer who ordered in advanced be shipped to a customer who ordered same-day, or 3) get someone to constantly intervene in the automatic allocation to game the results to what we wanted. One person mentioned that it seemed like we should not use inventory to hide process problems–the same planning manager who had carelessly accused the work leader of keeping inadequate safety stock.

The rank-and-file planner who was brought into the meeting left clearly downcast. I did was not present for most of the meeting; I don’t know what had already been discussed. I can’t imagine a way he could have left without feeling like all the layers of management above him had no idea what they were doing. For months we had trained our previous plant manager on how things currently worked and how they could be made to work with our current systems–and he, in turn, and passed along some education up the ladder to the man who ultimately fired him. Now both were gone, and we had a new pair that needed to be educated–and none of the people who remain in the layers in between seem to remember anything from the last time around. Once more we are learning how a three-legged stool works by shortening or lengthening one leg at a time.

There is one thing that everyone understands–plant manager, staff manager, department manager, salaried employee (if I ever ran into hourly employees any more I am sure they would also)–and even the new Vice Admiral, the new mover and shaker. They all understand that our systems way of assuming that a customer is requesting an item the same day if they do not supply a date is unfair. Managers and plant managers have told me that it makes no sense. The new manager in the position that I used to report to directly began to get a little loud as he told me that people’s livelihoods were on the line and it was no matter to take lightly. (Do not conclude I am an important person by the people I converse with — I represent a manager based elsewhere and sometimes get the initial reaction to policies or decisions that are not popular, but I do not control any policies that affect any of these people.) If we assume that customers want everything the next day when they don’t specify, and the majority do not specify, and we are being measured on how well we meet their (presumed) request, we are setting ourselves up to fail!

I agree that it would be better to default to our stated lead time, giving the customer the option to override if they have some other wish. But there are much bigger problems to be had. If every manufacturing facility is being held to the same standard (and they are), it is unlikely that they will fire us all and close all our plants if we all attain roughly the same success by this measurement. If we work to demonstrate, explain, and document why we can’t meet this level of service–what long lead times we have by using overseas suppliers, what unpredictable response times we have with aging machinery–we can build the evidence that might convince distant high levels of management to help us do better. But we can’t treat our inability to achieve this high goal with the finality of death. The “It’s impossible” attitude was the seed of death for American car manufacturers, and it will be ours, too, eventually.

The last thing we need–and the first thing we seem inclinded to do–is to attempt to meet this impossible goal of shipping anything the same day by building mountains of inventory. You always lose with this strategy. A model becomes obsolete, you discover that some component was made wrong two batches ago, or you just don’t build quite enough of some unexpectedly popular item–you still fail. This calls for Lean manufacturing–and that does not mean firing everyone! It means cross-trained workers who can do different jobs depending on which jobs most need doing at this moment. It means machinery that is multifunctional or is rapidly change over, so that if customers actually want part B instead of part A we can accomodate. It means investing time and money into understanding what makes your machine break and what can prevent it from breaking. It means accepting higher costs for suppliers who can prove and maintain their delivery so that you can retain customers with solid promises, not attract them with lofty promises and lose them with repeated let-downs. It means a miminum of inventory in a minumum of places that requires a minimal amount of moving around, counting, touching, handling, and passing off to fashion it into the product the customer ordered. And we have the perfect opportunity to show how it is impossible to deliver a complete product in one day that relies on a component that takes 90 days to get from Pakistan or Israel or Korea.

But we dare not let ourselves do any worse than we must at the utmost limits of our imagination, and it seems that if we just had a lot of everything we might be able to ship anything at any time. But it is so unfair that they make it all the harder by assuming that customers would like to have everything the same day!

Getting in the pity party is cheap. Getting out is what costs you your job, your business, your industry.

When I was a boy I went to a carnival and attempted one or two of those games designed for you to fail. I could not climb the balancing ladder far enough to ring the bell. But I was convinced that if I was given a few more tries I would make it.

These days the game is called “Try to Get Anything Done Aside from Expedites.” I’m going to win the game tomorrow, I just know it.

With the set lead time pushing our delivery dates months out for “low usage” spare parts, the volume of expedite requests has been steadily increasing, Our service centers in particular have learned that it usually pays to expedite their orders if they actually want the parts to complete a repair; at least half of the parts are sitting on the shelf, waiting for the set lead time to elapse.

I am supposed to review the expedite request filed by the customer service rep to make sure that it is an acceptable request. The former Vice Admiral had declared that our plant would not expedite anything, so as to preserve the original build schedule and leave us fully responsible for any failure to adhere to the schedule (rather than blaming the reprioritization of order B for the late shipment of order A). That policy gave way to only expedites that met certain conditions being allowed: strategically important customers, customers with operations shut down for lack of a tool or part, or orders where we had already missed our original promise. But it was never really clear who the strategic customers were; oddly enough, they all think they are important. And then we would allow expedites if they paid air freight charges. But then some customers were close enough it didn’t make sense to air freight. And then we put the spare parts as well as the complete tools on set lead time, and we had abundant product on the shelf and it made no sense to wait two months to ship the part (where it had been almost tolerable to wait a few more days to ship a complete tool). So I am still supposed to enforce the revised rules, but so many orders meet one of the criteria or the other and there are so many expedites that I rush through, it is hard to watch for those few that do not qualify.

Basically, my function is to either a) pull in the ship date if it is obvious we can afford to, or b) advise planning how many pieces must be completed to fulfill the demand up to and including this order, so that they can advise a ship date. Both of these functions should be completely automated by a computer system that was worth using, but there are a couple of exceptions to the normal first-in-first out shipping sequence (strategically priority customers, customers who paid for expedited delivery) that render the lineup of orders as the planner sees it an unreliable guide to the sequence that the orders will actually allocate stock. The system can be set to ship the order if we have stock, but sometimes the available stock on hand will run out before we can satisfy the upcoming demand, and nobody thought to make the system smart enough to check if shipping order B today would leave order A high and dry tomorrow.

I simply cannot expedite orders all day long. On the other hand, I am supposed to make sure all the expedites get back to the customer within 24 hours. And once I have reviewed an expedite and sent it to the planner, the planner provides a date and sends the expedite back to me. Then I review to ensure that the planner’s response was satisfactory and send it back to the customer service rep, who calls the customer to inform them of the result of the expedite. It’s a horrifically inefficient process, and one of the nasty effects of this is the “slosh” effect. If I clean out my inbox of all expedites in the morning, in the afternoon the planners will be sending me back the replies at the same time as customer service is entering new expedites. I work the oldest expedite first to keep the total turn around time down (and because it is the easiest way to methodically work through the inbox), so I have to work through the planner replies before I can get to the new expedite requests. And, if the customer does not like the response on the expedite, the customer service rep will send the ticket back to me again. Thus, if you imagine the expedites as a tub of water, if I push the expedites over to the planner’s side they will come rushing back to me later in the day, often accompanied by a wave of new expedites.

Yesterday morning I found that one of my automatic reports had failed to run. This report gathers the information on lines that were shipped late so the planners can note why they were shipped late, forming a data set that can be used to review why we are late so often. Some of the information this report needs expires over time, and the results of the process are reviewed daily, so this report has to be fixed promptly when it fails. Once I had gotten that fixed (down at the other end of the building where I am borrowing the use of some low-usage PCs to do my slave labor) I went back to get started on the expedites for the day.

There are always other things that must be fit in as well, such as answering urgent e-mails (like questions from my boss or the plant manager), reviewing reports that show how well things that I am (supposed to be) monitoring are going, making sure affairs are in order for the most important customers, and answering phone calls. All in all I made good progress and was starting to get some month-end report for my boss that I was supposed to have gotten the day before. Right about that time the expedites started to come back from the planners, the production manager asked for some information, and I found out there was some kind of problem with the data I was going to give my boss.

Then the customer service reps started contacting me by instant-message that they particularly wanted to get out the door. And I found out that I had a major problem with my data, and likely all the other sites where I had helped set up standardized databases also had the same problem. Except, out of the three other sites, one of them might have already been fixed. So I called my fellow there and talked to him–and it sounded like he had fixed the problem, but wrongly. And that could have affected a lot of the reports that had been generated at this location, which incidentally was the headquarters location and the primary source for most of my boss’s data that he had probably already started passing on way up the food chain.

And then someone from one of the other sites contacted me by instant message to say that there was a problem with their copy of the Bridge, the complex orders shipped late program I referred to earlier, the one I had gone on a multi-state tour to set up back in October. So by this time I am trying to assess the damage to various interrelated databases at three different sites, with a fourth probably in dissarray as well. Quitting time was approaching fast, and even though I am not supposed to work overtime I could tell there was no way I was leaving on time–let alone getting to that report that the new purchasing & supply manager had asked me for (he’s in the job I used to report to, and an important ally in my current role, so it behooves me to make a good impression if possible).

Basically, at this time I was panicing, and I knew it. I needed to talk to someone to calm me down and talk me through what might be wrong with the databases, how to ascertain that, and how to fix the problem. The only person I had managed to talk to so far was the notorious individual with a knack for misunderstanding and mistrusting my databases and fixing them in harmful ways, the individual I had thought was going to be fired several months ago when we were setting some of these databases up.

My standard workplace setup uses two screens (laptop and monitor); one of those screens is generally devoted to four windows, two sessions each on two of the production software’s databases (one the local factory and the other the “mothership” system). Sometimes I am working across all four windows and sometimes just one or two. I generally try keep each window in a different “role” so that I can compare information when necessary, as it often is (very few screens on the system can show me everything I need to make decisions). Then of course there is always a window open for the e-mail program, two Access database windows open to assist in identifying the sequence of shipment on expedites, a internet browser window open for actually updating the expedite tickets, and usually at least one more Access database with several windows open, a couple of e-mails, and one or more Excel files. And probably some instant messaging windows, too.

On top of this mix I had a remote connection to systems in two other sites, and several windows open in each of those as I tried to diagnose the problem or various problems that could be affecting the accuracy of reports that my peers were sending to my boss for crucial month-end reports.

I was instant-messaging my boss’s second in command, G.J., trying to determine how their data had been fixed and whether it was an accurate fix, and just trying to unload on someone so I could calm down enough to think straight. She was not sure about the data as the person I had already talked to was supposed to fix it. About the time that I determined to my satisfaction that their data was okay I got a message from the first guy, because G.J. had apparently gotten after him asking him what he had screwed up this time. Actually he hadn’t done anything wrong, contrary to the impression I had gotten over the phone, and he even sent me exactly what I needed to fix up my database (and the others). The problem I was contacted about for the third site was not directly related to this major problem at all, although this third site did suffer from the problem, so I was fixing their problem while I was wondering what I was ever going to do about mine until I had gotten that file from the infamous fellow. I hadn’t been expecting that but I was putting off the big problem waiting for a solution to come to me out of the blue.

By that point I had called my boss to let him know about the problem (especially as he had left me a message asking why I hadn’t gotten him the data yet), and also contacted my peers in other sites to warn them they had sent bad data. It turned out that the good data from the headquarters covered for the bad data from the other sites.

I was not willing to leave my database in dissarray, so I took the time to fix it, although it wound up taking more time than I had guessed and pretty well preventing me from doing anything else while I was at it, although I was mostly sitting waiting for queries to finish executing.

I wound up going home about two and a half hours late, with 13 open expedites (about an hour’s work) that had all been opened at about 3 pm. I am supposed to leave at 4 pm and at 3:30 I am supposed to measure how many expedites are open with myself and all the planners. I hadn’t gotten the report for the production manager or for the purchasing and supply manager either.

When I came in today, the first thing I had to do was run a daily report that requires data from at least seven different sources and then copy part of that onto a giant whiteboard for the morning production meeting. At the production meeting the plant manager told me I had an error in a part of the report I thought was solid, and the plant manager asked me to change another part of the report completely.

This is a report I have been longing to automate for over a year now. I’ve never gotten around to automating it because the information it needs is pretty unique–automating it does not help me do anything else, nor does any of the other data collection I have already automated help me with this report. But because the report has so many different data sources, and is a daily report in an excel file, it is prone to all kinds of updating errors (accidentally saving over reports, forgetting to change something, or some of the semi-automatic parts of the report becoming obsolete or inaccurate). It desperately needs to be automated so that I no longer have to waste time on it (except when this automatic report fails, as they all do sometimes) and I can’t make so many mistakes by touching it daily, and the plant financial manager can have it on time every day while I am doing something else. Besides, any decent job automating it would make it easy to take care of the purchasing and supply manager’s request, as well as the plant manager’s request.

But all I could manage was working out the problem that the production manager had pointed out, which took more time than I expected. Meanwhile I had gotten an e-mail from someone else asking me to change a report I had previously set up for them. The same person called me later in the day asking for a change to another report. Meanwhile the expedites continued to go up; many of these were from yesterday and need to be sent to the planners soon to keep the turnaround anywhere close to 24 hours.

The number of open expedites managed to climb to 37 (about three hours of work) while I was working on them, although I was also working on fixing the major database issue for the second site at the same time. I sent a distress call to headquarters asking for backup on the expedites.

In the end, I managed to fix both reports for the person who called me today, take care of the production manager’s request from yesterday and the error he found today, fix the second site’s database, and help the infamous fellow fix another problem with the On Time Delivery Bridge for the headquarters (I am supposed to be teaching him how to maintain this creation of mine). I even got the expedites down to zero before 3 pm, partly because I had help. I still had to report 3 expedites open with me today because after 3:00 pm the tickets “sloshed” on me again; it actually went from 3 to 10 while I was on the phone with a planner helping him with one of them, but I cleaned up all the easy, send-back-to-customer tickets before I reported. (I cheated a little there, and ran the report late.)

I only went home half an hour late. I still didn’t get the report for the new purchasing and supply manager, or the change the plant manager asked for. But tomorrow, I am going to get all my expedite tickets cleaned up early and take care of that. And I am going to make the obligatory updates on my self-evaluation that I have to get done this week (or maybe it is due tomorrow).

The economic nosedive is affecting Acme. Open orders on the books are dwindling. It was just announced that the plant will be closed for two days because of business conditions.

About 10% of the orders are past due. Past our promise, mind you, which is almost always later than what the customer wants in any case. To some extent, we as a factory cannot help that; a machine that makes parts for a Really Large Tool usually cannot make parts for a Really Small Tool. Capacity is not interchangable for any and all models. When several machines break down several times for product that is fairly unique, we have limited outsourcing options and must slog through our backlog when we finally get the machines up. And replacing machines requires capital from Corporate–hardly forthcoming in this climate.

But if we can’t find a way to adapt our idle capacity to deliver our backlogged product, well, then we are wrong two ways at once, offering product nobody wants and tardy delivering product our customers need to keep their customers in an increasing strained market.

Acme gives all of its employees a turkey at this time of year. Acme employs a lot of temporary workers–which is to say, Acme does not employ them, they are employed by the agencies, so they do not get turkeys. Acme does employ a number of high school co-ops; since they are Acme employees, they get turkeys. Many of the temps work for a much longer period of time than the co-ops, to say nothing of more hours a week; but the co-ops are employees of Acme and the temps are not.

There are also two college co-ops interning from a nationally respected college. They are employed through the temp agency, and do not get turkeys.

One of those co-ops has been given a role as a planner, and has been fully effective in that role–more effective than perhaps one or two of the salaried planners. This co-op happened to be standing by my desk when the announcement came over the intercom that employees must claim their turkeys in the next ten minutes, as the remainder would be sent to the Food Pantry.

“I don’t understand why I can’t have a turkey,” she said.

“Oh, you can have a turkey,” I assured. “Just go down there and ask for one. Any of the managers you have worked for will gladly give you a turkey.” But she was very unsure, so I went down with her.

“You already got a ten dollar gift card from the temp agency,” objected one of the HR associates.

“You have plenty of turkeys left,” I countered. The other managers standing around were talking amongs themselves and not paying any attention. The co-op got a turkey. But she felt guilty and embarassed, as though she were theiving it. We happened upon the plant manager as we walked back. “Tell her she deserves a turkey,” I said, and he did.

The next day, the HR Manager came to my desk and explained that, for legal reasons, we have to keep a clear distinction between our employees and the employees of the temp agencies.

The Big Mean Scary Guy is gone. Let’s call him Vice-Admiral; he was not an Admiral but he was a vice, and it gives a vague premonition of his stature in this global, multibillion dollar company. The rumor is that Vice-Admiral was told not to get on the plane for the trip he was planning. This transpired while the Vice-Admiral was here, in our town, inside the plant he had threatened to lock up with his own hands. There were a few poignant days as the rumor circulated around and settled in.

The termination of his employment came as he was wrapping up one of those theatrical events wherein the top brass show that they have a strong connection with the common man by working alongside him. Of course the common man mostly continues to do the work as the attendents of the honorary present a bounty of colored charts and expert opinions, but I digress from my point.

The Vice-Admiral had been keel-hauled by a congregation of distributors for the way our promise dates and delivery dates fluctuated independently of one another, so that while our promise dates were near our delivery dates were far, and vice-versa. To rectify this malady the Vice-Admiral had instituted an absolute policy of set lead times, so that we would not ship anything before we promised it and would not promise anything before we could ship it. The lead time was to be long enough that we could ship no matter how high the waves or strong the winds. In the course of events we still found several kinds of calamities severe enough to prevent us from meeting this lead time, but the general effect was to promise the product much later than we ordinarily needed to ship it, and to refuse to ship it sooner (on pain of our lives!).

Whatever song had been sung at that august gathering of distributors, the clamour raised by customers in general as we refused to ship product we had in boatloads (because our set lead time had not yet elapsed) reached into other branches of the Admiralty. The Vice-Admiral himself was persuaded to some moderations of the policy, first reducing the set lead time and then even granting better dates as the inventory allowed on the most popular items. This latter policy, I have recently learned, he condemned as contrary to his express directive, not admitting to any part in the discussions that had lead up to it.

May you trouble these waters no more, Vice-Admiral.

In keeping with this policy on lead time, all manner of new processes and reports were invented to support shipment by our promise date. Our manufacturing software allows for three dates: The date the customer wants the order, the date we say that we will ship the order, and a third date that actual schedules the supply chain. This third date, which I will call the schedule date, can be aligned to either of the other two dates. Before the Vice-Admiral reinvented our business, it was aligned to the customer’s date, which was generally the same as the date of order entry. This paid no heed to how long it actually took us to manufature the product. For example, if a widget takes three weeks to manufacture, you could wake up in the morning and be three weeks behind schedule because the customer ordered a widget last night. Scheduling was impossible.

Under the Vice-Admiral’s new rules, the schedule date was aligned to our set lead time, which (one hoped) always gave us enough time to manufacture. But by nature of it being a fixed amount of lead time, if we happened to have the widget in stock already the customer still had to wait three weeks. And our inventory levels are readily visible to a large number of our customers.

If you have not already deduced this, the Vice-Admiral’s replacement wants to replace all the sails and rigging and go right back to using the customer’s date. This reverses everything we have been fighting for over six bloody months; remember that our ship’s Captain was one of the casualties. Many of the crew are reluctant to take up the new Vice-Admiral’s wishes before they are expressed in a ironclad command.

There is a third way. We can continue to tie the schedule date to our promise date, but allow our promise date to fluctuate as our supply situation warrants. This tempers the evil of the promise dating heading east while the delivery date heads west; while we might still miss our original delivery date, they will at least tend in the same direction. It also removes the evil of refusing to ship to the customer while stock languishes on the shelf.

The one flaw in this compromise solution is the factors considered in floating the promise date. Certain considerations, such as scheduled work orders, are not necessarily reliable data in our system. In short, if we accept this floating logic we will miss significantly more of our promises than we do currently, and since we have been getting only a passing grade on our promise dates as it is we are terrified to make that change.

It is necessary and proper that we do. Then, we feel the pain of the problems with the system and we have constant motivation to improve. Remaining with our set lead time lets the customer in for a larger share of the dissatisfaction and allows us to be happy while they are disgruntled. If our grades drop but customers complain less we are in less real danger than we are if we have perfect scores and unhappy customers. With low scores we will face constant questioning from the admirality; with high scores and unhappy customers we risk sudden death.

My day ended today after my regular work hours as I watched the Captain and the First Mate decide to cut our set lead time in half for certain spare parts that our suppliers are supposed to ensure are always in stock. I argued as best I knew how for the floating promise, as described above; but who am I?

As I go through this story you will get a sense of the drama that has contributed to my silence here. When the stakes get high I get a little more cautious about publishing what I know, even in the semi-anonymous form that I follow.

Early in August, the plant manager’s boss scheduled a visit. In anticipation of this event the plant manager and all his staff prepared intensely. Although the plant has been progressing steadily, nobody had forgotten the visit in early May and the threat of drastic consequences if our delivery metrics were not improved. The staff all felt we had satisfied the ultimatum we were given, or got well enough on the way to it, that we were not in any serious risk with this visit. Nevertheless, the plant manager came in early on the day of the visit to put finishing touches on the presentation.

When the time came for the meeting and the corporate boss was ready and waiting, the plant manager was not present. The staff got underway without him, but nobody was quite sure what to make of it. The boss had talked to the plant manager when he first arrived, but he made no comment on the manager’s strange absence.

By the end of the day, when he had not shown up at all but remained in his office, even a naive youngster such as myself suspected there could only be one reason for a sudden change in priorities. And on the second day, when all the staff were paged by the plant manager’s secretary, it had practically been spelled out. But since I am naive boy, I was still confused. Everyone seemed to be getting more and more cheerful and chipper and cavalier. How could this be? Surely I was missing some piece of the puzzle.

But no. It was privately confirmed to me that the plant manager had resigned. In fact, in the official announcement stated that he had given notice of his intention to resign a month earlier. Even I was not naive enough to believe that, but there it was anyway, as a kind of social lie, a lie not ever meant to be believed but merely to indicate some remaining respect for this man who had worked for them for so many years in so many positions, who now was not wanted.

Although the plant manager kept every appearance of satisfaction and politeness until his last day, when he went around the plant and began admitting that he might have liked to stay longer. After work at his farewell party, after being toasted by his choked-up secretary, he said that it was easy to leave a company, and hard to leave people; and as he said so he had to be careful to keep his composure. He was the last person who had worked for the company at that level since Big Scary Guy joined the company and began scaring people.

His replacement was announced once he had left; he had been seen in the plant as early as April, when Big Scary Guy gave his ultimatum.

—-

Sometime in July my own boss had asked myself and several others on his team to work to create a standardized database so that we could all report consistently on our various facilities. At the end of July he also told me to begin tracking every line item we ship late out of our plant–specifically, to identify why it was missed. This explanation of lines shipped late constitutes a “bridge” between our on time delivery and 100% on time delivery.

My boss is headquartered at a warehouse facility; of its nature it is less complex than our production operation, although the volume of shipments is much greater. At the headquarters he had one of his team spending about half a day going through this kind of analysis. I knew there was no way I could get any helpful and accurate analysis of the misses out of our production facility on my own; I would need help from others in the plant. And I knew, from past projects, that a collaborative spreadsheet would result in a jumble of inconsistent information that would have to be arduously compiled, cleaned up, and rechecked by me.

Without feeling like I had any better alternative, I hastily assembled an Access database to keep track of the information with a form to make it easier for the less Access-fluent to understand and use the system. The forms and the attendant Visual Basic for Applications code was the only difficult part of that, but getting that interface put together in three days was a pretty good feat, I thought.

It impressed my boss enough that he wanted it available for the other sites as well. When I told him in a team meeting in July that half of what his team in the headquarters was doing could be done automatically, he really liked that idea. But I said it would have to depend on having the same foundational database in all sites, that project that we were already working on.

As August drew to a close my boss was getting impatient with our progress. I thought we had made progress with the foundational database, although I felt it had been slow; but the further we went with the project the more I felt that one of the other team members was dragging the project down. At first I thought we just didn’t communicate on the same wavelength. I have been accused before of being obstinate, a poor listener, and too absorbed in the details. All true in some measure. But more and more it seemed that C.K. just didn’t understand the spirit of the project. As I had understood the project, we needed to provide a common platform to support the work of all the team members. As C.K. seemed to understand it, we needed to regulate what the rest of the team did and restrict them to running approved queries–and even then it would never work, because the rest were an undisciplined group who did not understand the proper way to do anything and would not follow any rules.

When I talked with my boss, usually for other purposes, and he asked about the project I would mention that we had some difficulties but I thought we were working through them. But C.K.’s dismal view of the other team members finally put me in a position I did not feel I could work through; he was supposed to be representing the entire headquarters team, and he did not think any of them would properly use or appreciate the project once complete. And we had come to the point where the needs of the team had to be well represented to deliver a useful product.

So I went to my boss and said we needed others involved in the project, and explained why. But when I was talking with the team supervisor in the headquarters (we site-local team members and the data team report directly to the manager, but the headquarters team has a supervisor), explaining that we really only needed to load the queries the team needed into the database format we had agreed on, she said that she was not comfortable having C.K. do that.

C.K. is one of the two data specialists on the team, people who are focused specifically on the extraction and manipulation of data. Everyone on the team has to work data, but these two are meant to be the experts that the rest of the team could rely on. When the team supervisor said she could not rely on C.K. to build the queries her team used into a format that our project team agreed on, and she would rather have me travel there to do the work, I realized we were saying that C.K. should not hold the position he had.

And it came to pass that I was called to headquarters, along with rest of the team, to finish the project. We were given a week to finish the foundational database and the automatic bridge I had offered in concept a month ago. I knew our chances of completing that bridge were slim, but I drafted a schedule to aim for it. After the first day and a half I scheduled myself in a breakout group frantically working on that project, which only I of the team could envision and understand. That interface with the VBA code was disowned, disclaimed, and decried by C.K., who pointed out that this “Bridge” was too complex for anyone else to maintain, and would utterly depend on me, and was thus high-risk for a sector-wide tool. All true enough. But the person on the team who should have been ready to learn what I had done and prepare to support it was C.K. himself, along with his junior peer who had recently joined the team.

Before I got on the plane to travel to headquarters, I had given my manager, at his request, a written statement explaining my concerns with C.K. My manager had also made it clear that I was not alone in having difficulties with this member of the team and indicated that he was about to take decisive action to resolve ongoing issues.

So this was the situation I flew into. It crackled with tension, as C.K. was still on the team but, from my understanding, we were all there because he was not adequately fulfilling his role. And in that first day, when I had to leave the room, he took one of the critical queries off in a direction completely incongruent with where we had been taking the project. He said the whole team had agreed it would be best; but later when I talked to the individuals they said they did not remember discussing the matter at all.

For the rest of the week my job was basically to distract, divert, and occupy C.K. while the rest of the team finished the foundational database. I was also supposed to be working on the bridge, but I found I was much distracted trying to explain to C.K. the concept we were trying to achieve with the queries he was assigned to build. I think I had to explain four times that I wanted data refreshed with delete and append of rows rather than deletion and recreation of the entire table; he did not seem to grasp this relatively simple concept in database construction.

During this time when I was attempting to explain to him the concepts of database design as I had learned them I was not getting much done with the bridge, but I was building the beginning of a rapport with C.K. If he goofed something obvious to both of us I tried to put him at ease by recounting how often I made the same mistake. If he talked about some other project he worked on I listened and expressed appreciation. In short: I was nice.

As the week wore on–and it did wear, one 12 hour day after another–the team leader and I grew more and more frustrated with C.K.’s constant drag on the project, tugging whatever he was a part of in a direction different than what all the rest of the team agreed on. When we needed to use some functions within our queries, he immediately washed his hands of it, declaring it far too complex–and yet I managed to write it correctly on the very first try, because it really was not complex at all.

Thursday afternoon the team supervisor left the room to call the manager to tell him that C.K. was simply not effective. When she got back C.K. was summoned to talk to the manager (by phone, since the manager was at another facility the whole week). “I’m nervous,” the team leader confessed to me; we both thought this might be the end.

But when C.K. came back, it was not just to collect his belongings and leave. Instead he said, “Apparently some people on this team have told our boss that I am not cooperating with this project, so I’d like to ask everyone: what do you want me to do?” This was a most unfortunate conclusion because we actually wanted him to do nothing; he had not lacked for volunteering to do anything, he just did not understand how to do anything in a manner compatible with the goals and methods of the team.

It was an awkward moment. But we continued to be, as ever, as nice to C.K. as to anyone on the team, and yes, perhaps nicer. To his face we were as sweet as sweet tea.

Would it have been better for me to tell C.K., “I don’t think you understand what we are doing and I would rather if you’d just go back to your cube and do whatever and let us finish this ourselves?” No. And neither would it have accomplished anything good to treat him in any other way than with respect and courtesy. Yet it still felt wrong to treat him as nice as could be to his face while we told his boss we couldn’t stand working with him.

I thought he might be fired this Monday, but he remains in the employ of Acme, still my official liason to the headquarters team for the data projects. Only now he has had such conversations with our manager that he must surely suspect that we are all against him and saying awful things behind his back, no matter how sweetly we talk to his face.

Little children, do not trust the nice people.

The plant manager resigned. Very likely he was given some incentive to resign. Here’s a tip for detecting a sudden departure before it’s been announced: everyone who knows about it is having a good day. If they told you they were having a bad day you might ask why and they would have to think of an evasion or fabrication, so instead they are all having a good day.

And yes, they will lie about what they know. You can ask, but if you have to ask your chance of being told are slim. But don’t believe the rumor mill every time, either; there are about a half dozen people rumored to have been fired last week who are still showing up for their jobs (none of them is important enough to have a transition like the plant manager is getting).

The official deadline for our last ultimatum comes at the end of this month. At this moment it appears we will meet the requirement by a hair’s breadth. It also appears possible that the plant manager’s transition was planned for prior to when the ultimatum was delivered. Note that doing what you were told you had to do to keep your job does not mean that you will keep your job.

For the last three months the intense and exclusive effort has been on delivering product on time according to our promise to the customer. This is the explicit mandate we were given. We have made steady progress and have developed some long-term strategies to help us sustain this progress. This past week we found we were a whisker’s length from having the most important part of that foundation, that kept all the different disciplines in the plant synchronized, jerked out from under us–certain configurations of the plant software. Evidently the customers who told Big Scary Guy that we could deliver the product however late we had to deliver it, as long as it arrives when we promise it will, are now saying that we have to deliver the product a whole lot sooner or they will leave us. Again, we as a plant followed explicit instructions and made measurable progress on those instructions; but the entire apple cart may yet be overturned on us.

I think that will do for a brief summary of the adventures at Acme.

Sadly, I score about 80% on the faint-of-heart quiz.

The last job I had was basically self-managed and I didn’t start to relax in that one until they brought on someone who functioned as my manager (even though he technically wasn’t). My manager in my new job is based several states away. He’s done a good job of keeping in touch and responding to issues I have, and has been very careful to make sure my priorities are clear and I feel I can manage them. Kudos to him; not complaining about him here at all.

The reality of day-to-day work, though, is that after I’ve come in and taken care of routine things I have to do every day, I have to decide what needs to be done next and when my assigned priorities have to bend to urgencies of the day. Although I report to a man hundreds of miles a way, I work where I am to support the local facility–and in particular, because of some intense pressure on the factory, supporting the local facility is one of my boss’s top priorities for me. So I feel I should take care of any requests from anyone in the plant staff as expeditiously as possible.

While I am thinking along those lines, I am trying to manage “fallout” from other processes. I call it fallout because none of these things should warrant my attention if you just looked at my list of priorities. But they are issues tied to major efforts inside or outside of our plant, and there are other people involved who can’t or won’t just sit back and cool there heels about the issue. If I know that the issue can best be addressed by someone else I try to send people on their way with a tip for best results (i.e. this is how you know to ask this person, or be sure to have this information on hand when you ask that question). But often enough I believe I am the person best able to deal with the issue, and if I am not involved the problem will not be resolved correctly, completely, or in time; or it might possibly be resolved completely, but other people will have to go through extra effort and do some guessing and asking while I am confident I can get the relevant information much more quickly.

I don’t like to pass a problem along if I know the person I am giving it to could benefit from something I could add. So there are many things that, if I had an extreme situation on hand, I could just shrug and say, “Sorry, can’t help,” but if I am just busy I know the next person in line is too, and I don’t want to slack off what I could provide.

One of the things which is not my top priority is coordinating expedited orders. But even though this is not my top priority, if you don’t take care of an expedite in a timely fashion it is not being expedited, is it? And usually you will hear about it again until you get it taken care of, anyway. So that goes onto the must-do list, and while I am opening those e-mails it is hard not to check the others.

Most of the stuff I nominally should be doing the people I am supposed to be supporting are not all that interested in, and most of the stuff the people I am supposed to be supporting want me to do I nominally should not be doing. They are constantly pushing the boundaries of what my boss and the rest of the corporation have set as business policy.

For most of May and June I have been working frantically every day, but at the end of every day and every week I am not sure what I was working on. I don’t know what I am doing. I know how to do every particular thing that comes up for me to do, but in the larger picture I don’t know what I am working to accomplish, who it is benefitting, and if it makes any difference what I did by the next day or next week.

I have been able to relieve that somewhat in the last week or so by documenting what I am doing as I am doing it. Often enough there are gaps in my log because I got carried away doing things and forgot to jot down a note, but overall I can look back at the list at the end of the day and say, “Well, that’s what I did. That’s where the time went.”

Today I started the day thinking my day was mostly free and intending to do some work to reduce the time taken in some routine chores. I never even began that, though, because during the events of the day I began to think that maybe a different project was more urgently needed to try to help sooth some issues of contention between the local site and my boss. I did manage to get started on that but by the end of the day I felt maybe I should have been working frantically on a whole different line of work which is really vain, because it accomplishes little that wouldn’t happen anyway–trying to force things to ship this month that would ship readily enough in another week or so. I try to avoid that, but the whole corporation is in an uproar about missing financial goals, and sometimes you have to just do the stupid work with the rest of the team.

My morale has been at a low ebb anyway because there doesn’t seem to have been any great disaster, or really much notice at all, from my leaving my last position and not being replaced. That will pretty well make you feel worthless. I am easily reached if there was some kind of crisis where my help was needed, and I have been flattered and somewhat cheered by a number of people outside the plant coming to me because they need something actually taken care of; but outsiders develop a knack for soft targets, and it is not necessarily my expertise that brings them to me as my willingness to jump through hoops and make work for other people in the plant.

And generally, that’s what it feels like I have been doing–in my current job and, in retrospect, in my previous job. There isn’t any actual work that is going undone with my departure, just all the drama and fanfare that went along with me helping with the work. You take out my excitable personality, leave some people a little more jaded and a little more willing to let things sort themselves out, and when it’s all said and done there’s not really any less accomplished.

I know a lot of this is the same all over. I know that even when you have a boss who’s right near by there are still multiple priorities, still the possibility of frantic working in circles. Better a boss far away than one who’s constantly pulling you from one thing to the next! Ultimately everyone has to manage their own time because all bosses will pile things on until you manage to get the critical projects done but not the lesser tasks.

I think I will learn to manage my work a little better, in time. Give me a few more months and I will start to wear grooves for myself in how I handle my job. Then I’ll start whining that I’m bored. Right now, when I’m not at work, my mind is still at work, fretting. It’s not productive thinking, just “What did I not get done today? What do I have to do tomorrow? What can I do tomorrow? How is tomorrow going to be different from today? What can I do differently than today? What did I not get done? What kept me from doing it? What should my priorities be tomorrow?” And on and on in endless questions, always asking the next question and never finding any answers.

I wonder if some of the reason I have worked so much over time is just to convince myself that it really is critical that I do . . .you know, the stuff I’m doing. But I know it was important, because if it wasn’t critical there’s no way I would have let it stop me from doing, you know, all those other critically important projects that haven’t been started for months without anyone besides me noticing.

Yeah, it’s just life, really. Not that special, and I’d complain I was bored if I knew exactly what I was going to do every day. But it’s got me in a tizzy, too distracted and disoriented to give any interesting commentary on what I am doing.