Interview Story - Accomplishment

When I was working for Wistron as a Supply Chain Manager, we got a new customer Ecobee, a Canadian company, who manufactures smart thermostats. At the time, I was assigned to a different customer account (Whirlpool). My boss called me on a Friday and told me Ecobee was not happy with how business and communication is going with the Wistron factory in Mexico. He was afraid we might lose the account if we didn’t get an immediate improvement.

He asked to prepare and present to Ecobee the material status in the meeting with the customer the following week, and help him to turn the situation around.

Ecobee had been very concerned with the high number of shortages, over 70 out of the 250 on the bill of material components with little action taken to solve them.

I was told by my manager that the previous reports presented by someone from the factory received poor feedback. The customer complained these reports were not clear on the purchase orders status and were very long, and complicated. The presenter didn’t communicate well what actions were taken to resolve the problems. Ecobee wanted to know based on the current material situation how many units they can build and nobody could properly answer their questions.

During the following week, I worked with Mexico’s buyers via conference call to review and modify the shortage reports, called suppliers, and escalated the major problems to our Sourcing team located in Taiwan. For the next meeting with the customer, I compiled an easy-to-read report with the top 10 most constrained parts. This included how many finished units we could build based on these top 10.

I included our ongoing actions to resolve each constraint part and what support was needed from the customer. I left aside the components shortages for standard parts that were easy to solve to make the report easy to understand, but I assigned actions to our buyers and checked on them regularly to make sure we followed up and closed these actions.

I presented the new report to the customer, taking the time to explain the report logic and data, answer their questions and be as transparent as possible.

After a few intense weeks of expediting and escalations with vendors, Ecobee was much happier with the progress and material status. They stayed our customer. At their request, I was assigned permanently as the main contact person on supply chain issues for their account.

I started to go to the Ecobee Toronto office twice/week and have the meetings in person. During the last 3 years, we developed a close relationship, a deep understanding of each company’s issues and processes, and learned more about their challenges. This lead to better collaboration and communication on how we could help each other. During this time business increased by over 200%. Wistron received 5 more products to build and manufacturing expanded to factories in China and Taiwan.