The Problem Usually Isn’t Where You Think It Is

At a recent weekly production meeting, we were reviewing jobs that were already late and others at risk of missing their delivery dates.

One job caught my attention. It was due in less than a week, and the current operation was outside zinc plating.

The reaction from our production and planning managers was immediate.

“Those platers can’t be relied on. They’re always late.”

It was an understandable conclusion. We had parts sitting at an outside vendor, very little time remaining, and no apparent way to meet the delivery date.

But before accepting that explanation, I wanted to know how long the vendor had actually had the parts.

Their quoted lead time was ten days. They had received the parts only two days earlier.

That changed the conversation.

We couldn’t reasonably hold the supplier responsible for missing a delivery date when we hadn’t given them the time they needed to do the work. The parts had arrived at plating too late.

So why?

The next explanation

We opened the job history and started reviewing the timeline.

The order had been released several weeks earlier. Raw material was available, the job was scheduled, and the estimated in-house operations represented a relatively small amount of production time.

After accounting for outside processing, transportation, and handling, we still had several weeks in which to complete the internal work.

The next conclusion was that production must have been too busy.

That was certainly possible. Capacity constraints are real, and jobs sometimes wait because more urgent work consumes the available resources.

But we had the information needed to check that assumption, so we did.

We reviewed the historical schedule and capacity information for the departments involved. Both were among the least heavily loaded departments in the shop, with substantial unused capacity during the period in question.

We had the material. We had the capacity. We had the schedule.

Yet production hadn’t started until nearly a month after the job was released.

Something had clearly gone wrong, but the lack of available capacity wasn’t the explanation.

The operator becomes the problem

With the material, schedule, and available capacity accounted for, attention shifted toward the operator responsible for the first operation.

Had he overlooked the job? Was he disorganized? Had he simply failed to follow the schedule?

The production manager was frustrated enough to suggest involving HR and pursuing disciplinary action.

I understood the frustration. We had work that should have been completed, and the information available to us didn’t justify the delay.

But I wasn’t convinced we understood what had happened.

We had already established that the department wasn’t overloaded. In fact, I knew we’d been through a relatively slow period.

So I asked what the laser operator had been doing during that time.

The production manager explained that he’d been working in the finishing department. With insufficient laser work to keep him occupied, we’d reassigned him to help with painting.

There was nothing inherently wrong with that decision. Moving available labor to a department that needs help can be an effective way to use resources.

But it introduced another question.

If the laser operator was working in finishing, was he still monitoring the laser schedule?

No. And there was no particular reason to expect him to. While assigned to painting, his attention was on that work.

Someone else needed to be responsible for ensuring that scheduled laser jobs were completed.

I asked who that person was.

For a moment, nobody had an answer.

Now we were getting somewhere.

The work was scheduled. The responsibility wasn’t.

We continued tracing how laser work had been handled during the temporary reassignment.

In practice, the production manager had been coordinating the laser work himself. As new jobs came in, he would identify what needed to be cut, pull the operator out of finishing, and authorize the time required to complete the work.

That arrangement appeared to be functioning. Jobs were coming in, being identified, and getting completed.

But what about the work that was already on the schedule before this arrangement began?

We looked further into the job history and the timing of the operator’s assignments.

The job in question had landed on the laser schedule while the regular operator was away on vacation. The production manager’s manual method of assigning laser work began after that job was already scheduled.

New work was being identified and assigned, but nobody had accounted for the complete backlog of work that was already scheduled when the responsibilities changed.

Our job had fallen through the gap.

It eventually came to someone’s attention and production began, but by then most of the time available for completing the outside processing had already been consumed.

The schedule wasn’t wrong. The job wasn’t missing from the system. The material wasn’t unavailable, and the department wasn’t overloaded.

We had changed the way labor was being managed without establishing how the existing workload would continue to be managed.

That was the problem.

What would discipline have accomplished?

This was the part of the investigation that concerned me most.

We started with an unreliable vendor. Then we had a production department that supposedly couldn’t keep up. Eventually, we were considering whether an operator needed to be disciplined.

Each explanation appeared to fit the information available at that moment. But each time we looked further, we found something that challenged it.

Had we stopped at the operator, we might have disciplined someone who wasn’t responsible for monitoring that schedule under the temporary working arrangement.

And the actual problem would still have existed.

The next time we reassigned an employee or changed departmental responsibilities, another job could have been missed for exactly the same reason.

This doesn’t eliminate personal accountability. People still have responsibilities, and performance problems do exist.

But before holding someone accountable for a failure, we need to establish what they were actually responsible for and whether the process gave them a fair opportunity to succeed.

In this case, the evidence pointed toward a gap in management’s process, not an operator who had knowingly ignored assigned work.

That is a very different problem to address.

Finding the cause isn’t the same as fixing the problem

Once we understood how this particular job had been overlooked, there was another question to answer.

Was it the only one?

We had identified a failure in the way scheduled work was being managed during a temporary staffing change. There was no reason to assume it had affected only one job.

As an immediate action from the meeting, I assigned the production manager to investigate other open jobs for similar circumstances and determine whether additional orders might be at risk.

That investigation is underway.

We also identified the scheduling and responsibility gap as an opportunity for improvement. The formal OFI has not yet been assigned, and the permanent solution remains to be determined.

Before changing the process, we need to understand how far the problem reaches. Then we need to establish how responsibility for scheduled work will be maintained whenever people are reassigned or normal departmental arrangements change.

Finding the cause of one failure is useful. Understanding the extent of the risk and preventing it from happening again is the work that follows.

What the meeting actually accomplished

We left the meeting with a better understanding of why the job had been missed and an investigation to determine whether other work was exposed to the same problem.

What stays with me, though, is how easily the conversation could have ended somewhere else.

We had several opportunities to accept an explanation, assign blame, and move on. Had we done that, we might have taken action against the wrong person while leaving the conditions that caused the problem untouched.

Sometimes the first explanation is correct. A vendor is late, a department is overloaded, or an employee makes a mistake.

But when the evidence doesn’t quite fit, I think we owe it to the people involved and to the business to keep looking.

In this case, one late job revealed something more important than a missed delivery date.

It revealed a responsibility nobody realized had been left unassigned.