Preparation of the company product that was promised to a ma

Preparation of the company product that was promised to a major customer is running late, and there is intense pressure on the production team to deliver the product. The director of production is eventually told by the company president to deliver, “or else.” The director therefore decides to ship the product, even though it had not gone through all of its testing procedures. Members of the production team become upset due to their uncertainty about the functionality and reliability of the shipped product. The director, however, insists that “We will just have to take that chance.” As the director of production, how would you have acted differently?

Solution

This is definitely a tricky situation which many organizations in the industry face today. This is why most organizations have started measuring OTIF - On Time In Full. This basically tells the company/function how much of whatever they have promiised the customer have they delivered as per the promised/committed delivery date.

Here, it is a clear case of the organization failing to meet the customer\'s timelines. It is important to note that delayed deliveries can cause a lot of cascading losses to the customers - many activities that they might have planned basis this deliivery will now get affected.

If I were the director, I would first see how many testing procedures are there. If there are 10 procedures, for example, how many of them are critical? That is, I will first check how many of these checks are critical to quality? For instance, a quality check on the paint quality might be good to have, but it is not really necessary/has a bearing on the reliability of the product. However, a quality check on the internal components functioning is going to be crucial to the testing.

I would first: