Forever in a Pickle

It occurs to me that Right & Wrong  have been replaced- in the US it appears that Right & Wrong have been replaced by Democrat and Republican and the meanings interchange regularly.  If the Perpertrator is Republican and you are Democrat then Rebublican means wrong and vice versa.  In the UK the same occurs, however not now along the lines of Conservative or Labour – we have to replace Republican & Democrat with Brexiteer and Remainer

The worst nightmare for companies up and down the land is to turn the telly on or look at twitter and find a disaster that may have been caused by a material they have possibly supplied.  In my humble opinion and based upon my own experiences, the seeds are sowed for a disaster of this scale in many businesses and organisations on a daily basis.  Businesses make decisions on products selection based upon Insuffiecient Information, Mis-Information and because of Commercial Pressures to either succeed or survive.

Players in any supply chain can be many and varied and whilst at the top of the supply chain an End User or Main Contractor may be large and extremely well qualified, this product will be broken down into many individual components, raw materials and parts and enquiries or invitations to tender can be fired off at will. The final enquiry for a small but critical product may end up being dealt with, by the new Sales Correspondant, who has been in an industry for 2 weeks and can miss critical detail unintentionally.

The enquiries may be received by any number of players, but whether it ends up with an expert on that particular material, may be a matter of chance and even if it does, the experts may only received this information second, third or fourth hand.  Most larger organisations, contractors and businesses are consistent in trying to reduce their supplier base and to do this they often use Purchasing Agents, Large Scale Distributors or Purchasing Consultants.

These Purchasing Agents and Distributors are already one or 2 steps removed and often havn`t been given all of the information required to source the product correctly, additionally the Purchaser Assigned is probably not skilled in all of the products he or she is sourcing. The purchaser will then fire off enquiries to likely suitors or try to find best fits in a big thick catalogue or on line. Too often these enquiries will be responded to by Companies who recognise certain keywords and think this or that will do, many companies are more interested in response times and targets, than the technical issues, and will simply quote a price and delivery for a standard product that is their best fit.  

On  the occasion the experts receive an enquiry, they will often need more information than they have been supplied with and will fire back questions, these questions can often be not easily answered by the Purchaser, and often the communication lines to get this information back, can be too difficult for the Purchaser to pursue.  This can often result in the actual experts being excluded from any bid, as they have not been compliant in just providing a price and delivery.
There are many other variations to the scenarios outlined above, and I am not inferring that this was the actual scenario in the awful Grenfell Tragedy, however as a Business Leader who struggles everyday with either a lack of information or mis-information, I see potential issues each and everyday.  Most are not intentional, but a classic tale of Chinese Whispers.

I remain `forever in a pickle`