Peeling Back the Layers: How This Product Manager Diagnosed Root Causes in Complex Supply Chains

Yeah, this is a, unfortunately, this was a common, uh, a common scenario in my world, in the in the construction industry, especially when you're dealing with specialty chemicals sold through distribution. Um, Oftentimes, what's being installed in the field is layers and layers away from the manufacturer. However, when something negative or non-optimal happens in the field, they run straight to the manufacturer. So, There's typically this process of Uncover peeling the onion every time we would get a claim or a complaint, where you need to go through a distributor, perhaps the distributor sales rep, perhaps an independent sales rep, um, perhaps a field service consultant, perhaps our technical field service representative. Um, then you get to the GC that may go to a subcontractor, that may then go to a, uh, a field technician, who has one of his young guys installing it, right? So, many, many layers. This was actually a very important thing for us to solve, uh, throughout my career. So, I always try to implement a process, especially with distribution, products sold through distribution, where we would work backwards on the premise of what can go wrong. And I took this notion as far as implementing it into our two-day training course, that we'd have, uh, at our uh manufacturing facility. And we'd spend 2 hours on what can go wrong. Um, And it's to address this exact scenario. So, we would train at the distributor level, at the independent rep level, at the field technician level to have a reporting with field logs. So, we had a reporting system that came from the field. So, whoever was installing this in the field, if they wanted to say that they were a manufactured, manufacturer-trained or factory-trained, they had to submit these field logs. Um, and what these field logs would do is go then back up the chain. So instead of us getting a call several layers down of a problem that was happening, um, we would, the first question that we could ask in these, in these calls is, let's track the field log. And then you have several layers of sign off essentially on who saw that. Now, That's great in principle, as I'm sure, you know, you, you get it, but what happens when that, when that doesn't happen. Um, then we would just simply work through, through the progression, um, with a little bit, obviously, more scrutiny, because a lot of times, the end user is not necessarily telling you what he did right or did wrong, cause he doesn't want to get in trouble. Um, So, what we would often do is we would send our field technician out, and, I mean, our field technician was fantastic, uh, um, industry leading guy, the best. Um, he would jump on a plane at any time and go anywhere. So, we would send him out if it was, you know, if we couldn't rectify this through our distributor or their rep, we would send him out to the job. And what we saw was that this was a bigger opportunity to galvanize our relationship with, with the person having trouble in the field than to tell them that It didn't, you know, sorry, it didn't work. You didn't have your field logs. You know, we would, we would actually send, put somebody on a plane, go out there, help them, and we quickly saw that, I mean, we had a specific project in Denver that we did this, and that, that customer was exponentially more loyal to us because we didn't point fingers at their guy. We didn't, we didn't point fingers at the distributor. Now, we did see it as an opportunity that we needed to. You know, train better. We needed to take ownership of it and, you know, say, OK, well, the distributor missed the boat here. Why? You know, that's because we didn't communicate. Effectively, apparently that these field logs were a requirement. Um. But that's,

um. just knowledge of, of what goes on in the field. Um, you know, if you, if you start to ask questions, uh, I've been on enough projects, and our whole team had been physically on enough projects that There's so many little nuances that can happen. For instance, if you mix this product at 60 degrees, it's gonna perform a little bit different than it's at 80 degrees. If you add 2% catalyst, it's gonna perform a little bit differently than if you add 6% catalyst. So, even myself with tons of experience, I could have drastically different results in the field, just not keeping an eye on the details, you know, of what's the temperature, what's the catalyst percentage, what, how long am I mixing it, and what pressure am I pumping that? Um, you know, what's the substrate condition? What's the thickness? What's the, you know, there's many different nuances that we saw always came up in the questioning process. So, when a problem happened, we always got to this place anyway, asking all of these questions. Why not proactively track those variables, and by doing that, just tracking that, you know, what measure gets done, essentially, you know, just by tracking in itself, improve the performance of our end users in the field. And we, we actually saw a decrease in claims just by implementing the field log, presumably just because people had to Acknowledge it.

Sure. So, um, how we kept track of, so we were, I also did ISO 9001 quality control for our company. Um, so through that ISO process, you have to have very strict. Um, logs of, of customer claims. And unfortunately, we didn't have a dollar value associated to it. What we did was just kept kept track of just sheer number of claims coming from the distribution side. Um, before we did the field loans, we were probably operating at about 20 to 22, somewhere in, in, in there, um, claims per year. And we had, the last year I was there, I believe we had 8. So, I mean, we had over, uh, you know, probably 60. 60, 70% reduction. Um, but that was just one of the metrics that we had to submit with our ISO 9001 audit.

So I, I, I don't want to get too bore you with too, too nuanced of an answer. Um, but with these products, you, you, you have to mix them in a, in a, in a certain manner. And a lot of times, so, the packaging comes kind of pre pre-proportioned. And a lot of end users, it's common in our industry, they just open one, dump it into the other, mix it, and pump it. Um, what this logbook did was Enforced the idea of the, there were two main things that we saw. One, that they had to measure, so they were actually measuring, and then they had to observe. And we had, part of it was cup test, you know, did Uh, did you do a cup test? Do you have a picture of it? Um, And that that alone. But I mean, we, we got feedback from, from the contractors in general that that step alone of making that person actually physically mix a little bit of the cup and, and see that it reacted correctly, was a huge um preventer of, of error. That's fair.