When I wrote here more frequently, one of my inspirations was watching the interaction between management and workers. My first work for hire was alongside workers, and the cultural background of my family would have a blue collar if it wore collared shirts at all. But I have always favored ideas that look neat on paper, and preferred clever schemes to reduce repetitive labor over unhesitating engagement of the actual work. Since I left for college I have hovered at the periphery of the white-collared world, not yet fully immersed but further than ever from the rough hands and rough jokes of the fellowship of hard labor.

More than anything else about work, I dislike its repetition. I will try to lend a hand to just about any work, but when the days ahead look to me much the same as the days gone by, I get impatient. I’m always looking for change, for a challenge, for a chance to find some solution never before seen under the sun.

It is said that the working class doesn’t like change. I don’t know about that. It is probably true, to an extent. I myself like a steady frame of reference to keep my constant changes in a rational relationship. But I think there’s a deeper root to working class obstinance. Working people hate hypocrisy. There is nobody more frequently the footman to aristocratic changes than hypocrisy. When some change is announced, look for any of these trademarks:

• The new right way is the same as an old right way, two or three changes ago.
• Group (department, business) A is told that it is absolutely essential that this be done, but Group B doesn’t have to do it.
• Objective A is obviously at cross-purposes with Objective B.

It is marvelously easy to spot one of these smirking sycophants fawning along any time somebody important comes through announcing changes. More wonderful still is the ability of the white-collar class to ignore these hypocrisies; sometimes they will feign they do not exist, but more often they just politely ignore them for the greater good. After all, the essential purpose of the new change is valid; it’s not productive to quibble about the details. Better to pretend they don’t exist. In public, at any rate; plenty of griping goes on behind closed doors. But no matter how much it outrages common sense and decency, the middle management always comes out smiling saying, “We can do this, we should do this, we will do this, it’s a wonderful idea.”

It’s all they exist to do. Working people don’t have to be managed into doing something that makes sense. They must be corralled and herded and cajoled and threatened into things which do not appear to be good ideas at all. If middle managers didn’t support the policies they didn’t like, they would be simply more obstinate cows to be herded along. It’s marching to the beat that distinguishes the soldier from the criminal.

The duplicity runs deeper, and at every level it disgusts the worker. To succeed in management you must ask for a favor when you deserve a reward, call compromising on a good idea improving it, attempt to ingratiate yourself with your enemies and call on the goodwill of your friends. The natural shape of virtue and vice is turned inside out; humility is the cloak of treachery. The working man would rather damn his enemies and reward his friends promptly and with sincerity; and if he wanted to be somewhere tomorrow he’d start walking in that direction today.

Ethically I am much inclined to agree with the working man. It is possible to be a manager in true humility, obeying and supporting decisions you do not agree with up to the moral boundary of conscience. But it is a very difficult thing, akin to walking through a maze while keeping your gaze fixed above on the north star. You can never focus on what is right in front of you; either you will smash yourself against the wall in front of you, trying to get straight through to your goal, or you will become lost in the twists and turns of the labyrinth.

The struggle to maintain personal integrity while fulfilling the managerial responsibilities fascinates me, since I don’t want to plod in the circle of routine work but neither want to surrender the ethics of justice. When I worked with the shipping department I saw this drama played out almost daily. Shortly after I moved back to the front office I sat in meetings at a higher level than I ever had before and was especially cautious of saying too much. Particularly with the critical theme of my remarks, I do not want anything too personal or commercially confidential finding its way onto this blog.

With the recent changes in leadership in the levels of Acme above me, my role appears to be settling toward something more routine with very little opportunity to observe the management conundrum (other than as it is applied to myself personally). I have been reorganized to report up to my former manager through a new supervisor (this is not related to the much larger changes in leadership mentioned in previous posts). In prior months, when my manager was discussing my current and future career, my interest in possibly entering the ranks of management came up. I have always been happy with my manager and I wouldn’t lightly discount his advice, so when he suggested that I read The One-Minute Manager, I thought I ought to.

Aside from some appalling, smarmy gimmicks about touching people to show you care, the gist of the book was the same as any other advice I have ever seen. It can be reduced to two points:

1. Respect your people.
2. Communicate clearly your expectations, what was well done, and what is not satisfactory.

It’s not the concept of good management that is hard to grasp, it’s the practice. In my experience of being managed, the hardest of all is communicating expectations. But some are still better than others. And I think the manager I have now gets lost in the maze of blending the facts you know with your own opinions and with what you are allowed to say; the result is a blend of indirect, non-judgmental, incremental statements and questions that do not seem to be built around any central purpose. I throw him an issue and he looks at both sides, drives for root causes, considers the consequences, looks at ultimate goals, and comes back with some kind of intermediate step which admittedly doesn’t solve anything but is hopefully a step toward making things better eventually somehow.

I sympathize with him–I often feel like I am in over my head when I have to balance my strong opinions and known facts with the subtler arts of working with the powers that be. I think that while I was in the indeterminate position of possibly being in the chain of management in shipping but possibly just an auxiliary I sometimes was too blithe in accepting some new policy as if there were nothing objectionable about it, too quick to expect anyone who wasn’t going along of just being perverse. We’re trying to make things better, people! What’s wrong with you, why don’t you cooperate?

There are managers who lack one or more of conscience, perspicuity, or common sense. But there are also managers who haven’t figured out how to get these virtues to cooperate with the directives they have to carry out. I am not ready to put my new manager into that former category. I only hope he quickly learns that applying management techniques such as promulgated in The One-Minute Manager is not managing. The use of a technique is not the same as the accomplishment of a purpose.

If you are sailing a boat and the wind is not blowing the direction you need to go, you cannot simply ask the wind to cooperate and expect results. You have to tack, to take a diagonal course that is a compromise between the direction the wind is blowing and the direction you want to go. But let us say that you have two possible destinations: one is north and one is south. The wind is blowing westward. If you ask your manager, “Where are we going?” and his answer is “We should tack,” he has given you the right technique from the textbook but he has not answered your question at all.

I think in extremes. I know I think in extremes and I know that limits my ability to adapt. When I have job situations that seem to require totally opposed solutions, I need my supervisor to explain to me how to reconcile them. And when his answer is, “We need to tack,” I’m lost at sea.

I had pulled up a sales order for one reason or another when I notice on the order header:

Sold To: Friendly Neighborhood Distributor
Ship To: Recently Acquired Subsidiary of Acme

When I say “recently,” I do not mean last week. I mean a major acquisition that was announced, reviewed, and has been in place for at least one financial quarter. Our part of the business operates under Acme’s flagship name, so there is no possibility that a buyer ordering the product would not realize it is made by their new parent company. No, for whatever inscrutable reason, we have chosen to pay a distributor their markup for them to sell us our own product–without their ever touching the item, at that.

Clearly I am in the wrong business. I wrote an short e-mail to my boss pointing out this nonsense; I said we had an opportunity to drive an acquisition synergy.

It was a week for sarcastic e-mails.

Acme Tool Co. is not especially vulnerable to the current economic climate, supported as we are by a repair industry, and repair being a fact in a cynic’s life and not just a realtor’s dream of an ever-exploding house value. But the collapse of unbounded optimism is sucking quite a lot down the drain with it. Somewhere around a dozen salaried employees were shed from our plant; we were among the fortunate, and the discerning ear can hear the tremors of further exfoliation.

One of the reasons our employment has not deteriorated further is the decision by our new Vice-Admiral to build up inventory–lots and lots of inventory. I’m sure I commented at least once on this site that the simplest way to improve your on-time delivery is to have plenty on hand to ship, and that is the general direction we are headed in. The obsession with cash flow — or inventory turnaround — has faded to a background murmur. After all you can’t worry about cash flow unless you have money flowing in, and you can’t have that without product flowing out. And today that means you can’t afford to let a customer walk away just because you couldn’t ship on the same day he ordered.

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?