It'll Be Done in 24 Hours

It's just the same with all these Gantt Charts.

The most important thing is the completion date or the delivery date, whichever is appropriate at the time of placing the purchase order, and that can come from either party to the transaction. A supplier that meets or beats that date is to be trusted and automatically gets repeat business.

Ones that don't meet the date start getting Tactical Nuclear Phone Calls.

It really is amazing how important it is to set expectations.

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The very same service can be perceived as either 'exceptionally good' or 'unacceptable' based entirely on the expectation that was set.

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'Under-promise, over-deliver' may lose some business upfront to those who 'over-promise', but it won't be long before those customers come back around.

I have worked as a service tech at a number of places over the years and your story is all too familiar to me.

The biggest problem I found most often was that the place I ordered the parts from did in fact ship the item next day rush order however they are actually just a middleman in the system and they have to wait the usual time for what ever rush order they receive to get to them.

Then there are the customers who want it fixed right now and I got their equipment fixed and ready for next day pick up only to have them not show up for a week or more.

Yeah I was caught out once when I was young and keen... dragged myself in to work with a bad sinus cold to finish this important-must-be-out-by-the-end-of-the-week job.
Got it done, ended up with a week off work with sinusitis, got back and the job was still sitting there.

I vowed never again to jeopardise my health.

Guy E-mailed me yesterday wanting a custom bow sting.
I said pop over tomorrow.
I did it while he waited for some folding cash and a bottle of red wine. That's how to do business.
Del

In my former employ, I would rush to get a job that had to be done by closing time, only to have it sit in my bosses in-basket over the weekend. I guess his golf date or cocktail hour was more important. I have found vendors that would have my order in my hands the next day or two at the most. Those are the vendors I deal with exclusively. Find a good vendor and put him on speed dial.

I recently found out that a place I worked at two summers ago as a large equipment service tech finally wised up and booted my old manager out who booted me over largely made up reasons that never flew with the rest of the crew there.

He was my and most everyone elses bottleneck when it came to nearly everything. Slow ording rush parts. slow checking them in when they did show up, slow assigning the right persons to the right service work, and slow contacting the customers to let them know when their equipment was done.

I have been half tempted to check in with them being the state Job search system says my position has been open and looking for someone for 2 years now.

Delivery overnight. I can't speak for our neighbors across the pond, but here in the US, the postal service goes out of their way to sell you express packages even when standard would have the same results. UPS and FedEx gives you tracking numbers (as well as US Postal) and are pretty good.

Some tracking are real time some are updates

This is a terrific commentary on an attribute of Latin American countries where mañana simply means "not today".

I guess what was not told to you was the "*", which could be saying something like 24 hours means 24 working hours, starting the subsequent day. It is common for companies to make tall claims and charge about services with little conformance. If you try to complain then the "*" comes out and you will be convinced that compnay was right and it was your "FAULT" or "BAD LUCK" that the service delivery was late, however as per compnay policies they have delivered in time.

Most carriers offer a money-back guarantee on next day deliveries, so the supplier may not have been charged IF the carrier caused the delay (Details usually on packaging). Some suppliers are happy to refund delivery cost, others don't get repeat business.

I had some run in's with Project managers, "it needs to be done Yesterday" get it done and then it is lying on their desk for a few days.

Those are the ones that use printed-out Gantt Charts; nothing else matters to those morons.

Life is what happens to us when we are busy making other plans. John Lennon

DEL,

You misunderstood "24 Hrs Service" it was 24 Hrs before next week i.e instead of coming Tuesday it came 24 Hrs before on Monday..

When it fianlly got here it wasn't the part I'd asked for anyway.

On the plus side the other two things have sorted themselves out in the end despite my impatience.

Del

Once had a boss who redesigned our purchase request forms and added check boxes for low, medium, and high priority. Guess which one was always checked and which two were hardly every checked. (",)

regards,

Vulcan

Hi Del,

Well, sounds like normal life to me. Sorry.

It's not always attributable to "bad folks" (although that is sometimes the case), but it is often attributable to folks who are "disconnected" from their role in the way the food chain works ... they don't realize the importance their individual role plays in the total scheme of things.

If their job is to make sure the order gets to the warehouse floor, and it gets left on their desk ... well, what's just one more day. After all, it's 4:59, and I wanna get out of here.

If their job is to make sure the part is picked, packed, and shipped, but it's my break time, and those 18 remaining orders will just have to wait.

I once had a verbal altercation with one if my engineers whose end result was sloppy and incomplete ... I asked him, "Don't you care?" His answer was classic.

"Will my life be any better if I cared?"

In the end, that same attitude permeates business at every level. It doesn't mean there are not still good people within the organization, but it only takes one poor link in the chain to make it dysfunctional. Sad, really, because no one from the top to the bottom of the organization seems to be able to spot the problems, but just views the declining bottom line month after month until things are critical. Customer service is a lost art. It's not taught, and certainly it is not insisted upon.

Two good cases in point:

My current cellular service provider managed to double bill me a few months ago. I called and received an apology, stating the money would be refunded to my account. They said it would take 3 or 4 days. Ten days later, nothing had happened, so I called again. I was upset, but not to the "bear with a sore head" point ... until ... they actually refused to take care of the problem AND laughed at me over the phone for my insistence! WOW!

Another involves my wife's medications which come in the mail. Similar to your situation, the meds were ordered and paid extra for over-night delivery. They didn't come, and a return call the next day found they had not put in the order internally ... "we're so sorry" ... the package finally came about 4 days later. Another WOW!

To a couple of the other posts, some have eluded to the GHANTT chart folks ... aka Project Management. I will agree that for most who carry that title, they are more in the business of reporting what HAS happened, rather than managing what SHOULD happen and engaging in "crisis management" to keep things moving. But, as one who has done this for years, it doesn't have to work that way. The operative word in Project Management is ... well ... MANAGEMENT. All the PM tools in the world won't make a poor manager better, any more than a hammer and saw will inherently make an inept man a better carpenter. They're tools that work, but only if they used as such, and not the "bible" for how things ought to be.

One more thing ... SHAME ON YOU for believing everything was going to work out as planned . It never does. Last night my air conditioning (cooling) went out in our home. I checked the obvious, and called the repair man. He said, "I don't think we can make it out today, but we'll try." Not at all what I wanted to hear, but I appreciated his honesty ... much better that having expectations that were not fulfilled.

Kind regards ...

Dude...
You can't tell us half a story!
C'mon... we want to know the rest of your double billing story...
The guy that laughed down the phone... did they ever find his body?

As for 'shame on me' I think not!
I try to do as I would be done by. I try really hard to not make promises I can't keep and I try above all to be honest.
Your aircon went belly up and you admit you didn't fix it yourself... on this forum??
Del

(BTW your post was soooo long, I had to get Kris to read it to me as a bed time story...)

Hi Del,

Sorry for my LONG WINDED story, but the longer I can keep you reading the less you have to think about your LATE project .

There isn't much more to tell about the mobile phone story ... the service provider is Virgin Mobile. We switched several months ago from Verizon because of cost, not knowing the real price to pay was poor service. VM has their Customer-Disservice in the Virgin Islands, so a little difficult to "reach out and touch someone" AND more difficult to find anyone who is willing to take responsibility.

We'll have to just be PATIENT to see how the story ends.

Kind regards ...

My major problem is going thru purchasing. Between RFQs and gate passes and time delay on submitting and being checked in by stores, i never make a delivery date.

On my website and my business cards I have written:

"...We may be slow. . . . but we do it right!"

I am always way behind on delivery of gear....way behind. The only saving grace is that there just aren't a lot of net shops left that build their own gear OR ELSE I'd be in really deep doo doo! Ha Ha Ha!

Well, good answer, but I was expecting it a bit earlier than this!

cnc jim

I have typically went with either of these two.

You can pay me by the job or by the hour. Either way your cost will be the same but one will get it done quicker.

What I lack in speed I make up for with inefficiency. Poor planning on your part does not make it an emergency on mine.

I recall about 15 years ago, that I had order steel that was not so common.

Del. was 7-9 weeks, ordinary it was 3-4 weeks. I notice the person that took the order sounded....... Sleepy, so I requested a confirmation which I got.

6 weeks later I did a follow up, (it was critical). I talked to the same sleepy guy. And his response was "what order?"

I reordered it again, was promised in 3-4 weeks and got the confirmation and I called a few days later and again, same person with the response of "what order?"

He said he be happy to place the order.

Instead I demanded to talked to his boss, explained the issues I had with the inside sales with the confirmations i received and I asked who his boss was, and if I didn't get the order in 2 weeks, which was the original del. date, that was who I was going to call.

This was a big outfit, Ryerson, and I received del. on the original date.

Next time I called Ryerson, the sleepy 'dude' was gone.

All the above posts lead to bad customer service. Normally on the container of the product there is customer care phone number given along with the e-mail ID. We should always make loud complaint to the customer service man also record the same by e-mail. If it goes to deaf years then we should file complaint with "Consumer Court" which we have in India and hope there must be in existence through out the world.

Keeping quiet and to suffer will only result in more sufferings for other customers.

The problem i have is, I don't want to be put on hold waiting to talk to customer service.

I just want my order.