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Manufacturing flexibility is getting a lot
of attention these days. Recently, much of the discussion at
the Automotive News conference held in Birmingham was on the
need to be "flexible". It's ironic that
manufacturing flexibility is considered key to achieve success
in the automotive industry since so few actually are either
flexible or successful. Maybe there's more to it than just
manufacturing flexibility.
To be clear, flexibility can take many
forms. If you can change die setups quickly without penalty to
output or productivity, you're said to have machine
flexibility. However, it may not be enough. Why? Because
flexibility only counts if the customer is better served as a
result. Being "machine" flexible can be negated by
functional inflexibility. Functional inflexibility might come
from a hierarchical organization structure that restricts
information sharing between functional areas. The discipline
of the organization overrides the flexibility to respond in
one of the functions such as manufacturing.
It's 2 pm on a Friday when a call comes in
to the Q/A manager's desk at the Atlanta terminal of a major
freight company (annual revenues in the billions). It's a
customer service representative who is transferring a call
from a panicked customer, a member of the Birmingham Quilters
Guild. She has been told that a package which had been
scheduled for Thursday delivery would not be arriving until
Monday. The problem is, the package contains special quilts
that make up an international exhibit that are to be displayed
at the guild's annual quilt show. The show will be over on
Sunday, so a Monday delivery would do her no good. The quilts
were originally misrouted by another terminal and have finally
made it to Atlanta.
The customer offers to drive over from
Birmingham to pick up the quilts but is told the trailer is
sealed and no one is allowed to break the seal. However,
realizing the trailer will be in Birmingham by 2 am the next
morning, The Q/A manager puts the customer on hold and calls
his counterpart in Birmingham. Even though there's no customer
pickup allowed on Saturdays the Birmingham Q/A manager
volunteers to call the customer as soon as the package arrives
and is unloaded.
The relieved customer arrives at the
Birmingham terminal at 6:45 am, pick ups the package
containing the quilts and the show goes on without a hitch. On
Monday, the terminal manager receives homemade cookies along
with a thank you card. While not quite sure what he's done to
deserve them, he notes that the cookies are his favorites and
shares them with the Q/A manager who then fills him in on the
story. Another success story and an example of flexibility;
except that's not the way it happened.
In fact, on the fourth frustrating call to
customer service Friday morning, the customer was told, "it
will be delivered Monday. That's the best we can do."
Finally, the customer got the representative to tell her the
package was in Atlanta. She asked to speak to the terminal
manager but was given the Q/A manager instead. When the
customer said, "I'll come to Atlanta and pick the package
up", the Q/A manager said that the trailer was sealed and
the seal could not be broken. When the customer expressed
amazement that the trailer was going to sit in Atlanta over
the weekend, the Q/A manager revealed the trailer was in fact
going to Birmingham that night. When pressed, the Q/A manager
gave the customer the phone number of the terminal in
Birmingham but didn't know the name of his counterpart in
Birmingham.
A call to the Birmingham terminal manager
led instead to the Q/A manager who, after hearing the problem,
said it wasn't her fault and there was nothing she could do;
Saturday pickups were not allowed, the people would have left
by 8 am anyway. The customer said she knew the package was
arriving at 2 am and would be glad to come before 8 am to get
it. The Q/A manager repeated that no pickups were allowed on
Saturday so the customer asked to speak to the terminal
manager. Since the terminal manager was at lunch, the Q/A
manager said she would give him the message.
The customer hung up, thought about her
options and called her stock broker who gave her the name of
the president of the freight company and a phone number for
investor services since no other contact information was on
the web site. Investor services didn't answer so she called
back to the company's customer service asking to speak to the
president of the freight company. After a delay the customer
was transferred to headquarters. She finally was able to
explain the problem to an assistant to the president. From
there, things started to fall into place; the customer did
pick up the package at 6:45 am and the show went off without a
hitch.
The
point of this story is that the higher one has to go in an
organization to satisfy a customer, the less flexible that
company is. In this particular case, this freight company has
an express service with next day delivery. Despite that, the
organization wasn't customer centered enough to empower people
to help a panicked customer. Before you think of yourself as
flexible, find out how well your people can help a customer
without getting you involved.
*Journal
of Operations Mgt., April 1998; Koste, Malhotra / Definitions
of Flexibility Dimensions
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