This week has been hard too. Coming up to a Bank Holiday weekend is always the same. Everyone wants Monday’s work done by the Friday and then they also expect 5 days work done in four days.

Good news though, all the Supervisors are back but I am a bit concerned at how easily mechanical genius gets out of breath. He has been on good form this week. Process Supervisor’s father-in law has died so no more stress there until the funeral. The lab technician saga has turned out Ok. He did get some medical advice, stayed away for two days and told his parents. They have given the bad guy some stick and we are back on an even keel.

The thick liquid production has proceed quite well with outputs above target. So far so good! The customer seems to be pleased.

The re-labelling jobs have proceeded to plan and the customers seem to be reasonably happy, although they always want it more quickly.

The granule filling job is disappointing because we didn’t get the last bit done this week even though the extra bottles arrived. Overall we completed 31 jobs out of 33!

The packing of a special organic fertiliser granule proved a bit of a problem when we found some of it damp and some of it mouldy. Bad news. I was not happy that we didn’t seem to know what is acceptable and what is not in this situation so I put everything on “hold” until the client came in to tell us what is good and what is bad. Perhaps we will get it written up so that in future we can make the judgement ourselves! How often will I need to nag for this I wonder?

Yesterday we had two shipping containers to load for Brazil with the heavy gloopy stuff. It eventually went OK but the labels didn’t arrive until the night before the despatch so we were hard pressed to get the IBCs labelled and marked in time for loading. It turns out that this was not a result of the customer’s failings but rather the problems that they had in getting the shipping line to confirm and supply details for the documents. I hope that this doesn’t become a regular thing when we are loading containers twice a week.

Come to think of it, most of the events this week have had a connection with transport problems. Apart from the usual fury about vehicles that turn up without booking in, or worse, without any paperwork to say what they are to collect or who their load belongs to! We had a carrier turn up to collect a load with paperwork but a vehicle too small to carry the six pallets. The same day we were advised that a pallet that we had loaded the day before was to be returned because someone had tried to unload it without removing the straps from the vehicle and had consequently damaged all three drums. We managed to re-drum and re-label and re-palletise all three and re-despatch the same day. Heroic stuff but it puts pressure on everyone and jeopardises other production work.

Today we were the cause of problems to the haulier who had arrived early to make a collection for Holland and then arranged to return at noon when we said we would be ready with seven IBCs. But we weren’t, by about two hours! By this time the haulier had decided to come back on Tuesday so we had missed our target and let our customer down. He was remarkably accommodating about it. Worse is the fact that the batch we were late in making is out of specification and just now I don’t know why!

To give credit where it is due, our regular carrier for the hub and spoke pallet system has been giving exemplary service lately.

Yesterday there was focus on the packing of more of the packs of fragrance for public toilets. Some office staff stayed late the night before to get boxes folded so that there would be less chance of missing the delivery deadline. We made it but I’m not sure what the productivity figures look like. Furthermore we are now told by the client that because their client has set an unreasonably tight (and previously unspecified) deadline the work will be given to someone else to do because they have the capacity to produce in 2 days what will take us more than a week. That is the life of a contract packer! I wonder if they will actually keep their promise. Particularly as we are being asked to quote for inkjet coding the bottles before we send them to the new packer. This seems to be horribly expensive for the client even if it earns a few pounds for us.

Yesterday was also the day of an important client meeting and the monthly management meeting. The client meeting was encouraging with regard to the future prospects for sales of the client’s product and by extension work for us but the price that they are prepared to pay will be a long way short of what we would like to see for our efforts and possibly short of our “walk away point”. And this is a business that we have spent seven years helping to develop!

The management meeting was uneventful and morphed into a Director’s strategic review which only showed how much more we need to do to achieve the targets that we have set ourselves. We need to do so much on all fronts to make a difference. The business systems all need some adjustments to suit the changes to staff responsibilities and to the demand for better performance all round. If only I could get a response from Production equal to that which I got from the lab when I asked for a sample of a customer’s product to be made for despatch to France by 14:30. It was done by 14:00 even though Production didn’t deliver the materials until 11:00. Annoying when I asked for the materials at 08:30.

Tomorrow I need to be in at 06:00 to enable the new steel-work to be installed before next week.