"What have you changed in production?" the Sales Director asked the Production Director in a break during the get-together of the Leadership Team.
"What do you mean?" the Production Director asked in return, wary of the criticism he was used to receive from Sales.
"My sales folks don't have to waste
their time making excuses for late deliveries any longer! That used to be a great frustration for them, but now they are happy chaps, free to focus on building relations and making additional sales. We're overjoyed!"
"Ah! So you've noticed." the Production Director answered, relieved. "It's kind of funny. You know the system you had us install to make it possible for your guys to authenticate products in the field?"
"Yes, of course! isAuthentic. It's been great to rat out counterfeiters. What about it?"
"Well, when we realised the potential and how easy it was to install, we made our trusted suppliers for maintenance parts install it as well and now WE authenticate all parts coming into our spare parts store AND coming out of it too, before installing anything on our production machinery. It turned out that we had a substantial influx of fake spares before. Counterfeit spares that wore down faster than the originals and often broke all of a sudden. THAT was the cause of the production downtime that delayed our deliveries!"
"WOW! So our cost-cutting in sourcing of components and spares had opened back doors for rogue suppliers?"
"That's another way of putting it, yes", responded the Production Director. "But what we saved in purchasing, we lost several times over in costly production stand-stills, delayed deliveries and dissatisfied customers.... and heartburn in both production and sales."
"Indeed. My salesforce is much happier doing what they want and are supposed to do, than they were before." the Sales Director said.
"We're currently working on doing the same for incoming components too, as a safeguard against getting counterfeit parts into our own finished products too."
"I hadn't even thought about that being possible" said the Sales Director "but of course. Go for it! That would be a great sales argument for us! Authenticating components as a way to boost quality consistency. Great! isAuthentic from start to finish, in essence."
"Yup. isAuthentic through and through." finished the Production Director.
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