 Create a systemic process to evaluate suppliers by beginning with the end in mind. In this article we break down what to look for, and how to keep in mind when moving forward.
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 When was the last time your team, or company for that matter, delivered a project or product on time? Sounds like an easy and obvious question to answer however the reality would surprise you. Failure to deliver the goods, on time and to expectation, happens much more than most of us realize. In fact, we’ve become accustom to our expectations not being met, so much so that we barely even notice it anymore. UPS and FedEx are heralded as two of the best shipping and freight companies globally. The two combined do more than 24 million daily shipments on average. That’s a lot of Amazon orders. Did you know that a combined 19% of those packages don’t make it to their designation on time, or at all? That’s 4.5 million packages miss the mark, EVERY DAY! You may be thinking, “Why should I care about what happens at FedEx, after all I don’t work there.” Missing deadlines, or delivering the proverbial goods late, is more than just a shipping issue, it’s a global business issue and frankly it’s very bad for business. When we miss deadlines, or customer expectations for that matter, we experience all sorts of negative exposure, including:
When UPS or FedEx misses a delivery or puts a package back in que which should have already been delivered the ripple effect created for that driver and route can impact an entire days’ worth of work, or more. Same thing can be said for our customers. We got a call two weeks ago from a customer asking for help on a project of theirs which had already missed its deadline. Our customer, was two weeks past due on their product delivery date for their respective customer. Needless to say their customer was less then enthused. In fact, every day they fell behind in shipping their product they lost 11k USD in billable revenue. With costs surmounting quickly eating into their profit margin their customer also became wary of their ability to execute as they had hoped and expected. Phone calls between the two companies became increasingly frequent with the client becoming increasingly upset. Threats of the white-collar kind became a start to each call. Not a good position to be in. [thanks Captain Obvious] Our customer asked us to bring a team in and offload some of their work, mostly protocol and process related, so they could focus all their efforts in satisfying the commitment they made to their customer. Our team was to alleviate the bottleneck of work they were experiencing so other internal projects wouldn’t keep backing up as they had already begun to do. Once the bottleneck begins its incredibly challenging to get out of that rhythm and back on track without extra help. These types of moments are highly intense and stressful. One of the things our customer did with their end customer, which I found to be of high integrity and good professionalism, is they painstakingly told their customer what had happened to make them fall behind, apologized and took ownership for the failure to deliver and immediately shared with the customer their course of action to solve the problem. While their customer was rather upset along the way they did acknowledge the apology and things seemed to get underway shortly thereafter. The product ultimately was delivered 3 ½ weeks late of schedule costing our customer close to quarter of a million dollars in missed revenue. Tough lesson to learn on the importance of hitting deadlines and meeting expectations. Key Take Away: A wise person once said, “sh** happens”. A profound statement to say the least yet certainly true. Sometimes things do happen that are out of our control, taking ownership of the situation and asking for help can be the best two decisions we can make in these moments. Action Item: Don’t decide to ask for help when you’re already in hot water. If you’re watching your project timelines begin to slip immediately put in a plan of attack to lean on your suppliers for help. If your relationship with your customer is on good footing still you can try to proactively ask for an extension on the delivery date with the hopes that will provide some cushion to get work done on time. Note – don’t get in the habit of asking for deadline extensions. Once is fine, but to ask that of a customer often signals your company is unorganized and lacks leadership to meet it’s obligations. In need of someone to help you climb out of your project bottlenecks? Contact Square-1 Engineering at www.square1engineering.com to learn how we can help your solve your biggest engineering and technical business challenges.   You’ve got all the work in the world and not enough hands to complete it. Sound familiar? This situation plagues all companies, large and small, tenured and brand new alike. No company has endless resources, especially not on the employee side of things and as a result it’s a constant consideration for every company balancing work output and the resources needed to do so. When we’re buried with work most of us are fond of deploying the age old strategy ‘do more with what you have’. We ask our peers and employees to roll up their sleeves and put in the hours. Come in on the weekend. Camp out under your desk for a couple nights, it’ll be fun. Burn the midnight oil, so to speak. Kaplan Business School hit it on the head when they described this situation as “unrelenting, incessant amounts of work, which seems like there is no end to”. An important notation here is that this situation differs greatly from periodic times throughout a given year when work may increase for short spans. (ie holidays for retail businesses) While the ‘roll up your sleeves and do more with what you have’ approach may work in a pinch it’s a strategy that can have disastrous unintended consequences, consequences that far out weight the value received by stretching your resources to meet demands. When we load up our internal teams, employees and resources with heavy workloads it is common to experience: -Employee burnout -Increase employee stress and health issues like depression and addiction -Business overhead costs soar exponentially due to overtime expenditures -Even unnecessary legal and human resource expenses can occur if an employer isn’t following their States laws which address required breaks, meal times, etc; this also includes situations where employees feel they are being mistreated as seek legal protection as a result  What’s incredible is the cost that is associated with long term unrelenting amounts of work. Stanford University Graduate School of Business estimates burnout cost the US upwards of $190 BILLION in healthcare costs in 2015. During which it’s further estimated 120,000 deaths that year were attributed to workplace burnout and stress. If you’re looking for the problem statement in all this, well there it is and its about as tangible as it gets. Work overload at the office is a direct contributor to employee burnout, rising business and healthcare costs, and even death. While the stats may be disheartening on an initial pass the good news is there’s a solution to this business problem we all face. Solution to work overload & burnout = utilize outsourcing solutions! Outsourcing comes in many different forms. It can be as simple as having a supplier pick up additional projects or as complex as completely remoting work offsite as many companies do with shared service business functions like accounting, customer service/ call centers and shipping/ logistics. Our company recently got a call from a medical device customer asking for our help with a concept design project. We learned their internal team had been at max capacity for several months trying to meet a deadline and were struggling to get to the project. It was technically within their capabilities but would take their main designer several days to get up and running as he hadn’t done this type of work prior. Could their designer have figured it out eventually? Sure, he’s a smart bloke, certainly capable. However, the time it would have taken him to learn how to do the project versus the time our staff could handle it were two different things. It’s the difference between something we do everyday and something they do once in a blue moon. The customer made a smart business decision in looking at the work they had in front of them and identifying pieces of it they could outsource to be handled by someone else with the right expertise. The mini design project, as we’ll call it, took our expert designer only 32 hours to complete whereas the Director at our client informed us that would have been the time, at a minimum, it would have taken their internal designer just to learn the technique to get the job done. With this mini design project being handled by our team our customers resources were able to stay focused with their respective tasks at hand without having to divert their attention for a week or two to then jump back on their original work which was waiting for them the entire time. Our customer eventually met their deadline while simultaneously completing their concept design project via our staff AND keeping their staffs morale at a positive and manageable level given the workload. Key Take Away: Think beyond the age old approach ‘do more with what you have’; sometimes the best solution is to lean on someone else to do the work so you can keep your employees happy while successfully managing internal morale. Action Item: Review your project charters to see what work you can package up, either the entire project or pieces of it, to outsource to a competent supplier. Simultaneously pull data on all employees to identify the average amount of hours a week your workforce is putting in on your behalf. If your average number of hours worked per employee is beyond 50 hours in a 5 day work week you’ve got some work to do. In need of someone to help you with additional engineering and regulatory work? Contact Square-1 Engineering at www.square1engineering.com to learn how we can help your solve your biggest engineering and technical business challenges.   Your company is booming. Work is plentiful. Everyone is up to their eye balls in a flurry of activity. As your company works through each project you inevitably get hit with an unexpected curve ball that pauses your momentum, causing you to go off track. We’ve all been there and for some of us this is a daily, if not weekly, occurrence in our business. Learning how to deal with the unexpected and therefore being audible ready with a problem solving mentality very well may be one of the most important characteristics an employees can have. Yet, what do you do when your skills are maxed out and you don’t know how to solve the problem or get the project back on track? (note – the answer is not to turn to Google) Call your local Subject Matter Expert! (SME) John Reh of Balance Careers put it perfectly, “A subject matter expert in business is an individual with a deep understanding of a particular process, function, technology, machine, material or type of equipment. Individuals designated as subject matter experts are typically sought out by others interested in learning more about or leveraging their unique expertise to solve specific problems or help meet particular technical challenges.” It’s a mouthful, but 100% accurate. I experienced a situation last year where we had an opportunity to support a customer on a short term, one off project, where we were being brought in to provide guidance on product packaging and manufacturing sterilization methods. While we’ve done this kind of work plenty of times before I was initially concerned that this project would inevitably be different because this customers technology is by far one of the most complicated we’ve had the opportunity to work on. That said, it’s one of the reasons we love working with this customer. As the project came closer to deploying I realized our traditional approach to projects of this nature wouldn’t get us across the finish line, and or within the time frame we needed to in order to meet our deliverables. After making a couple phone calls we were able to get connected with a medical device industry expert in class III sterilization. Five minutes into the conversation with this guy, who we’ll refer to moving forward as Benji, it was crystal clear that Benji’s skills were far and above the average manufacturing engineer in our business. So much so that he unfolded a myriad of considerations in approaching a project of this nature, of which only half of them had already been considered by my team and the client. Needless to say I was beside myself with Benji’s expertise and understanding of sterilization processes and their requirements when it came to product packaging. It’s one thing to understand a concept, it’s an entirely different thing to be able to understand something so innately that you can apply that knowledge to myriad of applications, and do so in a timely, accurate manner. The cherry on the top here is being able to apply this knowledge in situations where there is no precedent to work from, in our situation working with cutting edge technology. As the project got underway Benji quickly took command of the project, assessed the current state of the product, it’s manufacturing processes and requirements for proper sterilization. He met with a slew of suppliers, performed material characterization studies and tested several processes in an elaborate and highly systematic process. The end result? We, thanks to the help of our Superhero SME Benji, successfully identified a sterilization process which both met our customers needs and did so in a way that exceeded their product packaging and manufacturing requirements. Best part, this was all accomplished 2 weeks before the project deadline! I look back on this project and sometimes wonder what would have happened if we had gone the typical route and project deployment for this type of work? Would we have finished on time? Would we have met the customers expectations? If I had to guess, probably not. As a result, our choice to bring in a Subject Matter Expert (SME) to handle the work for us and guide us to the promise land was by and large the best choice we could have made. A choice that benefited both our company and certainly our customer. Key Take Away: Don’t try to do everything yourself. Sometimes the best answer is to lean on an expert who’s experience in a particular area is light years beyond your own. This is a good time for us to set aside our egos and ask for help from people who are capable of getting us the solution we need while teaching us along the way. It’s worth every penny! Action Item: Don’t wait until you need an SME to begin looking for one. Start reaching out to industry associations, your personal connections or your suppliers to build a pool of people who have expertise in specific areas your business are involved in. Keep track of these people in a contact management tool or at a minimum Excel spreadsheet which provides detail on each SME’s capabilities, hourly rate or cost, location, typical availability, etc. Next time a challenge comes up you can’t readily answer yourself you’ll now have an ‘SME hot list’ of people you can access immediately to solve your business and project challenges. In need of an SME? Contact Square-1 Engineering at www.square1engineering.com to learn how we can help your solve your biggest engineering and technical business challenges.   I had always wanted to start a business! For years I tried my hand at inventing stuff, products that I thought would get me rich, if I could only sell a few million of them. First it was a gaming chair, then workout towels and even a handheld flashlight projector. I laugh looking back on those days while in college and the years shortly thereafter at some of the absurd things I did to try and be entrepreneur. What I would eventually find out are those ideas didn’t work out not because they were bad ideas necessarily but because I was following the wrong dream. It wasn’t until the summer of 2015 that I would find my way, diving head first into entrepreneurship. Thankfully I had a lot of help from many close people around me (wife, parents, friends) who all were incredibly supportive, as without them I’m not sure I would be here today. With the first year of entrepreneurship under the belt I’m continually amazed at how much I’ve learned and how much I continue to learn about being an entrepreneur and business in general. These are the eight experiences I’ve had which made the biggest impact being an entrepreneur: 1.Get A Mentor This is the single second best decision you’ll ever make in business. The first best decision is to become an entrepreneur. Mentors have experience which you can learn from helping you avoid mistakes along the way. 2.Support Gets You Over The Hump Make sure those close to you understand your vision and support it. They don’t have to buy in 100% but if it’s you against the world there are going to be some very long nights in store. If you are married it’s vital your spouse understands the opportunity and supports it, even in the down times. 3.Some Things CAN Wait Some people will tell you it’s important to write a business plan, vision, mission, blah blah blah, right away. Unless you’re in a situation where you need to ask for capital to start the business the best thing to do is put those things aside and focus all your efforts on how to make money. Ultimately being an entrepreneur means you’re selling something to someone so the more time you spend on how you’re going to gett paid for the product or service you’re providing the better off you’ll be. 4.You Can’t Be Everything To Everyone I failed miserably here. When I did start to get customers I tried to offer everything under the sun to get their business. Now, I never over promised and under delivered, however I spent an exorbitant amount of time in areas that weren’t lucrative or didn’t align ultimately with what the companies direction was. 5.Having A Plan-B Is Dangerous I’ve read countless articles about “the power of having a ‘plan-B’ ” or an alternative course of direction. I hate that advice. As an entrepreneur if you don’t believe in what you’re doing and have a plan-B set up in case you fail you’re almost destined to set yourself up for disappointment. I’m not saying it’s not important plan ahead for bumps in the road but if you’re going to start a business that should be your one and only focus. Anything other than a mentality of success has no place in your new direction. Visualize to materialize. 6.Outsource Work The first several months I attempted to handle all the accounting and finance portions of the business only to realize two things: 1 – I’m not good at it nor do I like it; 2 – I created more problems than I remedied. Best advice I got was to pay the money to get a good CPA that understood our business and could help us scale it up by making good decisions. Best money I’ve ever spent was on our CPA. 7.The Power Of Saying ‘No’ Crucial to your success as an entrepreneur is the ability to politely and professionally say ‘no’. Similar to ‘you can’t be everything to everyone’ saying ‘no’ is harder than it sounds. Naturally you want to say yes to everyone, making everyone around you happy, especially if it’s a customer. Unfortunately when we do this we get pulled in a hundred directions which causes us to deviate from our destined course. If you are asked to do something and it doesn’t align with your top 2 or 3 priorities politely decline and thank the person for the opportunity to be considered. 8.Breathe, It’ll Be Okay Very few things in life actually have the ability to stop you from moving forward in your new business. When bumps in the road momentarily derail you (you will experience plenty of bumps along the way) take a deep breath and be thankful for the opportunity to learn and grow as a professional. Stephen Covey put it best when he gave us the 90/10 principle: “10% of life is made up of what happens to you, 90% of life is decided by how you react.” – Stephen Covey About the AuthorTravis Smith is the founder and managing director of Square-1 Engineering, a medical device consulting firm, providing end to end engineering and compliance services. He successfully served the life sciences marketplace in SoCal for over 15 years and has been recognized as a ‘40 Under 40’ honoree by the Greater Irvine Chamber of Commerce as a top leader in Orange County, CA. Categories
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