Interview Story - Resolved a Conflict
When I was working for BlackBerry as a Team Lead of Supply Chain Specialists for Celestica, a few outsourcing partners manufactured the same devices. On one device, the demand increased exponentially without being forecasted. Many times we had to do shipment allocations between factories in order to keep the production lines running and keep BlackBerry customer orders delivered as promised.
On a Friday afternoon, one of my colleagues from another team who was managing another manufacturing partner, Jabil, came to my desk suddenly to ask for my help. One component’s stock was running out and would stop Jabil production over the weekend, jeopardizing the delivery for customer orders. She had already escalated to the vendor who confirmed they don’t have anything else ready to ship and the last shipment left and was in transit to my manufacturing partner, Celestica Monterrey in Mexico, to arrive that Saturday.
She asked for my help to get at least some of Celestica’s shipment re-allocated to her manufacturer, Jabil in order to maintain production. I checked with Celestica the status. They confirmed the shipment was coming in as scheduled, but if we decided to share the shipment with Jabil, Celestica customer orders and production would be impacted. Celestica rejected the request to share the material. It was their right to accept or reject since they owned and ordered the material.
I shared the response from Celestica with my colleague. She lost her patience, accusing me of not wanting to help. Her frustration was understandable. She wanted to ensure her manufacturer could deliver to her customers and would fail to do so without the component.
I kept calm and since our Director was not in the office anymore, I decided to escalate and ask Planning management to decide priorities on orders and customers, since one of these 2 factories would have to stop production regardless. I got the list of orders impacted from each factory. We had to decide which ones were the most important and the impact if we didn’t deliver some of them.
Planning advised delivering the orders for T-Mobile first which were the most important and BlackBerry had a critical business situation with T-Mobile at that time. Since Jabil was building the orders for T-Mobile, I had to accept to have Celestica stop the production, delay their orders, and gave up the shipment. The problem was to convince Celestica to agree to these terms.
I communicated to Celestica’s Supply Chain Director the situation and I asked them to accept and help with the shipment the next day. They had to make sure someone was working in the warehouse on Saturday and in contact directly with Jabil so the shipment would be received quickly and released to Jabil carrier. I reassured him that I’ll work on the recovery plan to minimize the production loss for Celestica, allocate the next shipment to them and that missing orders wouldn’t impact their KPI performance.
Because of this occasion, we implemented for the department an escalation path if a similar allocation situation occurred again between partners. Planning had to provide us with the correct priorities between factories. Also, each partner had to agree to include in their SLAs to follow our instructions first in a similar situation, even if it was against their regular internal procedure.