This week was a four day week and a month end. Strangely I feel tired but optimistic. For the first time for a while it seems that things are getting under control. By this I mean that the “to do” list is fractionally shorter than at this time last week. We completed all 20 jobs that were scheduled for the week. One job that the customer has been shouting for is done at last. Another, that is of major importance, is on schedule to ship an unprecedented 48 IBCs next Wednesday and we have only four small re-packing or re-labelling jobs left to do.

Last weekend’s preoccupation with drafting a strategic “core story” and expressing it as a “mind map” was both satisfying and useful as it ticks off one of my leadership tasks for the month. The main activity during the week has been to tidy up the dye solution products which have been accumulating at an alarming rate in the form of incompletely labelled drums. The customer has been ordering the product, which we have been making to his schedule but have been unable to properly label due to his failure to provide approved designs for the new CLP hazard warning labels. On Tuesday we had five different products that needed to be labelled, three products to be shipped and one to be made from scratch in one of our largest batch quantities, 4,000 litres.This one has a history of problems in which we have been accused of failing to meet the target assay. Long story short: the specification is tight, we don’t do the analysis, (done in US), we have difficulty in replicating the US analysis and we can’t explain the outcomes. This time we have modified our method and our UK customer is using a new test method before sending the samples to the US. Fingers crossed.

The CLP labels are required from 1st June so I’m pleased to say that they have now been approved, printed and applied to all the drums. I’ll be happier when we have despatched most of it.

Meanwhile the deodorant powder blend has made steady progress after a slow start and the customers reversion to the UK sourced bicarbonate has resulted in an improved productivity. Lets hope we don’t get any more of the French material next month.

The mysterious precipitation in the crucial production of the aqueous batch last Friday has been proven to result from an operator error in adding the wrong magnesium salt. We now have enough new materials to make a replacement batch on Monday and I will initiate the formal investigation/disciplinary process. We really must not make these elementary mistakes, the costs are potentially ruinous for the business..

The good processing news is that the all-important production of the oil suspension exceeded the 5,000 litres per day target for the week. The bad news is that one of the batches did not include all of the required ingredients and this is the second occasion when this has happened! Why has it happened again and where are the controls that were supposed to have been introduced to prevent it happening? Very worrying!

Good news for future sales came when one of our customers announced that the product that we make for them has been given registration approval and that this will open the door for approval in other countries. We could be seeing the start of orders flowing from this in less than six months and substantial business during 2016-17.

Two small orders for a powder blend were a source of annoyance on Thursday when the customer insisted that they should pay the price that I had quoted for ten times the production quantity and then argued that the price should be in Euros, now at 70% of sterling. Still to be resolved and clearly I should look at our quotation and order review process.

Excellent work yesterday from our Development Chemist who returned from holiday and encouragingly good work from his assistant during his absence. Mechanical genius is back and doing good things with rebuilding the bag filling machine and installing the dust collector for the oil-suspension vessels. Sadly he was needed to spend 90 minutes on Wednesday fixing the compressed air ring-main when one of the material handlers decided to take a short cut to remove a pallet of waste cardboard and took the airline and distribution board with it. Frustration! We can’t do without the FLT’s but they make people lazy and try to use them for everything. This job could have been done with a hand pallet truck (which was next to the pallet to be moved) and we would have avoided losing 90 minutes downtime for the whole factory. Has there been any disciplinary outcome? I wonder.

Ticking off a couple more leadership tasks we spent a useful hour addressing the non-conformity concerning the Product Development process raised at the ISO9002 audit. I think that had I attended the audit meeting we might have avoided the non-conformity but the underlying issue was a failure to understand and follow the process. I think that the improvements to the process will stand us in good stead and so will the improved understanding by the new QA manager and Development Chemist. Keeping the discipline of the process will be the key. Ultimately it is about asking and answering the key questions at the key stages between an idea and its production. What? Can we afford it? What is the benefit? When can it be done?

Secondly I felt that an hour spent reviewing the actions taken and the actions required to deal with the recent delivery of a wagon-load of product and materials belonging to a new customer was particularly useful. It seems that we have agreed to be a fulfillment house for a company with strong green credentials that has 8 or 9 products that are sold into the cycling sector. The intention is that we should make the finished products in due course using the materials provided. The stock was all delivered in April and we have been despatching finished goods but have not even assigned part numbers or recorded the quantities of the materials yet, let alone established the BOMs or methods of manufacture for the products. The plan is that this will be done in the next 2 weeks and I only hope that we are not asked to make anything before then. By the same token, if we are not asked to make something by mid June perhaps we should be putting it all back on a wagon and sending it away! I think that we have a gap in our sales process where we agree to take on someone’s stock without an agreed and costed plan for dealing with it. We have already spent an unspecified sum on receiving and counting the stock. We do not appear to have invoiced for any storage yet! This situation needs to be turned round in less than 3 months.

A related situation has arisen concerning another new customer for whom we have at least undertaken some filling and packing. In this case their previous contractor for this work has delivered to us a pallet of mixed goods, materials, finished goods, packaging and labels. Something that you might describe as a “jumble sale” lot. The covering delivery note was vaguely reminiscent of the facts. Under the circumstances it is not surprising that a contractor, losing the business, should dump all of the client’s property unceremoniously in boxes on a pallet and send them to the next contractor. Indeed the same occurs if the transfer follows from a contractor’s bankruptcy.

My concern with the specifics of this case is that the pallet was delivered on the 15th May and the goods weren’t counted until 28th May at which point we had a neat list of what had been counted but we still had a “jumble sale” lot on a pallet. It took several hours for one of our people to complete the count. In the intervening period we had been filling and packing bottles and packs which could have benefited from items in this “jumble sale” or which we could have converted to WIP efficiently for a forthcoming production lot. My general concern is that we don’t have a process for dealing with a “jumble sale” lot of items delivered by or on behalf of a customer. The process needs to be more than a matter of counting what is on the pallet or in the boxes. It needs to include the identification or creation of the part numbers and the aggregation and segregation of the stock items so that they can be stored promptly and properly and then relocated easily when they are required. As it stands, every one of our “jumble sale” lot will need to be re-handled at least once before it can be found and used again. The likelihood is that it will be handled several times before a proportion of it will be thrown away as at the end of every jumble sale. In this situation there is value added in counting and aggregating and segregating the items which is value that accrues to the customer, failure to do so is a cost that accrues to us, the contractor. If we have a recognised process we can account for it and, if the customer agrees, be paid for it. Even if they don’t agree to pay there are ways in which we can use this example of our added value to our advantage.

We can do better and Blatter must resign!