![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Oct. 23rd, 2015 05:31 pmAn observation on supply chains:
If you need a part or service delivered on a tight deadline, and you tell a vendor "If you can't deliver it on this deadline, we will buy it somewhere else," they will lie to you.
The thing about this is that even though I've seen it happen a hundred times, I'm not sure whose fault it is.
I'm not sure it's a malicious lie on the part of the vendor- I don't think they even say to themselves "I know that we can't deliver this on time, but if I say we will then we will get money, and by the time the customer realizes we can't deliver on time, they'll have no choice other than to wait the extra time for us to deliver." And I mean, I guess it would be rational if a little evil for them to think this! I wouldn't really consider it all that evil, because the business rules work both ways on it to balance it out- on the one hand, you get the initial business, but on the other hand, it's likely to cost you any repeat business. So if you want to intentionally lie, go for it, it'll probably hurt you in the long run.
But I don't think it's usually an intentional lie. I think that when you give someone an incentive for wishful thinking, they'll indulge in it. We ask them "Can you deliver by our deadline?" and they hear "If you really squeeze, and everything that needs to go right goes right, can you deliver by our deadline?" And so they throw out all of the safety margins in their timeline projections and they tell you they can deliver on time, and they lie to themselves and they lie to us about what their gut tells them- that those safety margins are put in the timeline for a reason.
And because of this, I always say that if you ask a vendor to hit an expedited timeline, you are asking them to lie to you, because you should know that if you ask the question, they will lie. And I'm inclined to feel that doing so means that you are really lying to yourself, telling yourself that they can really hit a deadline because your vendor said they could, when you know that all you've done is asked them to lie to you.
But that's not quite right. It's fully within the vendor's wherewithal to say "No, we can't actually hit the timeline you want, so your choices are to go elsewhere or accept our timeline." That's the responsible thing to do, and it would mean a whole lot less stress down the line, though it would suck for us because it would mean we can't hit our own promised deadline.
Entirely unrelatedly, my boss just asked me today if I could work some Sundays over the next few weeks...
If you need a part or service delivered on a tight deadline, and you tell a vendor "If you can't deliver it on this deadline, we will buy it somewhere else," they will lie to you.
The thing about this is that even though I've seen it happen a hundred times, I'm not sure whose fault it is.
I'm not sure it's a malicious lie on the part of the vendor- I don't think they even say to themselves "I know that we can't deliver this on time, but if I say we will then we will get money, and by the time the customer realizes we can't deliver on time, they'll have no choice other than to wait the extra time for us to deliver." And I mean, I guess it would be rational if a little evil for them to think this! I wouldn't really consider it all that evil, because the business rules work both ways on it to balance it out- on the one hand, you get the initial business, but on the other hand, it's likely to cost you any repeat business. So if you want to intentionally lie, go for it, it'll probably hurt you in the long run.
But I don't think it's usually an intentional lie. I think that when you give someone an incentive for wishful thinking, they'll indulge in it. We ask them "Can you deliver by our deadline?" and they hear "If you really squeeze, and everything that needs to go right goes right, can you deliver by our deadline?" And so they throw out all of the safety margins in their timeline projections and they tell you they can deliver on time, and they lie to themselves and they lie to us about what their gut tells them- that those safety margins are put in the timeline for a reason.
And because of this, I always say that if you ask a vendor to hit an expedited timeline, you are asking them to lie to you, because you should know that if you ask the question, they will lie. And I'm inclined to feel that doing so means that you are really lying to yourself, telling yourself that they can really hit a deadline because your vendor said they could, when you know that all you've done is asked them to lie to you.
But that's not quite right. It's fully within the vendor's wherewithal to say "No, we can't actually hit the timeline you want, so your choices are to go elsewhere or accept our timeline." That's the responsible thing to do, and it would mean a whole lot less stress down the line, though it would suck for us because it would mean we can't hit our own promised deadline.
Entirely unrelatedly, my boss just asked me today if I could work some Sundays over the next few weeks...