“Corporate” = lots of people on higher salaries with access to the entire company’s entire sales data and the time to analyse it, plus marketing degrees, finance degrees, MBAs and so on. Analysts, strategists, senior managers and C-level executives. People whose job it is to come up with an action plan to increase sales. So who do they give it to…every damn time? And isn’t it funny how they only want your opinion when it is for their benefit, never when it is an idea of your own for something that is needed on the shop floor or stock room.
I swear this is true.
My wife works in a factory where they make “box widgets.” (Not the real name. obv.) They use giant presses to bend the metal into parts for the box, then send them through the painting area, then add the parts from the wiring area, and assemble it together. There’s always some weird part every week that they can’t find spares for, and demand an extra 250 of or something. At the “employee suggestion meeting,” they asked if there were any suggestions. my wife said that if the department supervisors had a spreadsheet set up on their computers, they could more easily track which part batches were nearing completion and have things ready for the next bat ch. She was told they “had something almost exactly like that planned, and it will be up next week.”
…
Next week? They rivet a piece of sheet steel to the wall and hang transparent binder sheets for each department, held up with refrigerator magnets. Which nobody used, because you couldn’t see it from the different departments.
“Corporate” = lots of people on higher salaries with access to the entire company’s entire sales data and the time to analyse it, plus marketing degrees, finance degrees, MBAs and so on. Analysts, strategists, senior managers and C-level executives. People whose job it is to come up with an action plan to increase sales. So who do they give it to…every damn time? And isn’t it funny how they only want your opinion when it is for their benefit, never when it is an idea of your own for something that is needed on the shop floor or stock room.
I swear this is true.
My wife works in a factory where they make “box widgets.” (Not the real name. obv.) They use giant presses to bend the metal into parts for the box, then send them through the painting area, then add the parts from the wiring area, and assemble it together. There’s always some weird part every week that they can’t find spares for, and demand an extra 250 of or something. At the “employee suggestion meeting,” they asked if there were any suggestions. my wife said that if the department supervisors had a spreadsheet set up on their computers, they could more easily track which part batches were nearing completion and have things ready for the next bat ch. She was told they “had something almost exactly like that planned, and it will be up next week.”
…
Next week? They rivet a piece of sheet steel to the wall and hang transparent binder sheets for each department, held up with refrigerator magnets. Which nobody used, because you couldn’t see it from the different departments.