Many years ago, I was hired as the manager of a contractor operated
maintenance facility. During my first week I found boxes of repair parts
stashed under workstations and storage racks or laying in the isles of the
parts room.
When I asked the repair technicians why these parts had not been added
to the inventory and put in the correct parts bins, the answer was “we pulled
the parts we need to fix the the stuff the customer needed right away and just left the rest sit
till later”
As you can probably already imagine, “later” never came! Far too many of
the parts left uninventoried had become critical need and repairs could not be
completed waiting for parts that were under workbenches and storage racks.
My next step should be painfully obvious. Every nook and cranny, drawer
and hiding place was emptied, the parts (and equipment waiting for repair!)
were inventoried, placed in the correct storage location and the computerized
inventory updated.
Predictably, the vast majority of EDP (equipment dead lined for parts)
were cleared and the maintenance backlog that had existed for months magically
disappeared. We also discovered serious overstocks of parts that were critically
needed by other maintenance facilities that could be cross-shipped to clear
long standing backlogs.
The point is not that simple good practices fixed a silly problem or
that people taking the easy way out created more problems than they solved. The
real point is that looking only at the short term issue, the customer needs
this one piece of equipment by close of business, became a mind set that missed
the bigger issue.
Yes, that customer might be screaming for that one piece of equipment
today but, and it’s a critical but, if we didn’t return 1,200 units each and
every month the entire operation ground to a halt at a cost of (in 1983
dollars) a quarter of a million dollars a day.
We can all come up with a plan to get that one critical piece of
equipment repaired and back to the customer while still inventorying and
stocking the newly received parts. The repair technicians, as they should be,
were so focused on the single repair job they never looked beyond the
immediate pressure point.
What about the manager who should have been looking at the bigger
picture?
Trust me, the guy was very bright but he had been in the most high
pressure, visible job the company had for just under two years and had become
completely burned out. He was moved back into engineering and later to
engineering management where he performed brilliantly. I always suspected that
if he could have taken a month off, away from the daily pressure he would have
spotted the same issues and solutions I did.
The years I spent as the manager of that facility taught me more about
managing competing pressures and demands than anything before or since.
To paraphrase Kipling: If you can keep your head while all those around
you are loosing theirs, you will make a great manager.
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