Gorman wrote:
Not to mention their refusal to acknowledge and deal with problems..........
There's a reason for that, and it has to do with people who will take anything you say, and find some way to turn it into a negative. So it's just easier and safer to just say nothing.
I might try and be helpful, and tell someone that a part is on backorder, and so the repair will be delayed a little. My intentions are about as pure as can be, trying to simply let the person know what is going on with their unit. Now I'm not saying that the owner doesn't have the right to be a little disappointed about the delay, but what I would expect is the person to say something along the lines of, "Not what I was hoping to hear, but thank you for keeping me updated anyway." A simple reciprocation of professionalism. Instead, often times what you end up getting is a tirade about pretty much everything under the sun, sometimes you get some pretty fanciful conspiracy theories cooked up by the more... creative... people out there.
The truth is generally far more boring. You could write a book, and numerous people have in fact, on supply chain management. The current popular system is called just-in-time, where you basically try and operate on zero inventory, bringing in parts as you need them, or "just in time". Which is great from a cost savings angle, since you don't need to pay for a huge warehouse to stock a bunch of parts, those parts aren't sitting on the books so the capitol you might otherwise have to dump into warranty parts can be invested in R&D or some other area, and it generally means you operate with less overhead and can charge less for products. The problem is that if there's any disruption in the chain of companies that goes from raw materials all the way up to the finished product, it can have a huge ripple effect that just gets bigger as it makes its way along the chain. If there's a disruption in the raw materials, that is your worst nightmare come to life. So you might try and counter this by having a small buffer inventory, like enough materials to sustain normal operations for a month. If the delays are only 1-2 weeks in duration, then you're fine, but if you have a situation like the flooding in Thailand not too long ago, which caused a spike in HDD prices, what exactly are you going to do? Even if you have contracts with 2-3 different companies to supply parts, if all those companies are knocked out of commission for a couple of months because of some natural disaster... Anyone who has a viable solution to that problem could buy and sell Bill Gates hundreds of times over with the money they stand to make.
Of course the above is really a very oversimplified version. A proper analysis would be several hundred pages long. So let me ask you something Gorman... Just for the sake of argument let's say you are a waiter at a restaurant. You take a customer's order, give it to the cooks in the kitchen, and then pick it up when it's ready to take to the customer. Let's further assume that there are normally 3 cooks, but maybe one called in sick that night, and it just happens to be busier than usual... So being the conscientious waiter that you are, always thinking of the customer, you go over to apologize and try to explain that their food will be a little longer than expected. The customer then just loses it, accusing you of either intentionally neglecting to put their order in, or being incompetent and forgetting to put it in. They then accuse you of having some part in how the host(ess) told them the wait would be 30 minutes for a table, and it ended up being more like 45.
In that scenario, what would you tell the customer?