YES. We were doing an early run of a custom product and we missed our deadline by about a day and a half. Thankfully, our schedule had some wiggle room, and our product arrived at the purchaser exactly on the day it was promised. Although we were technically off the HOOK, I took it as an OPPORTUNITY to learn. One issue was that during training sessions, some assemblers didn’t SPEAK up and ask questions. Therefore, assumptions were made on the line, and these led to mistakes that we had to correct. I realized that the pride of some of them kept them quiet, and in future training sessions for UNIQUE short-run products, I vowed to engage everyone. I learned that it doesn’t matter how much experience your assemblers have – cooperation, listening and teamwork are still key to turning out products correctly and on-time.

Yes. We were doing an early run of a custom product and we missed our deadline by about a day and a half. Thankfully, our schedule had some wiggle room, and our product arrived at the purchaser exactly on the day it was promised. Although we were technically off the hook, I took it as an opportunity to learn. One issue was that during training sessions, some assemblers didn’t speak up and ask questions. Therefore, assumptions were made on the line, and these led to mistakes that we had to correct. I realized that the pride of some of them kept them quiet, and in future training sessions for unique short-run products, I vowed to engage everyone. I learned that it doesn’t matter how much experience your assemblers have – cooperation, listening and teamwork are still key to turning out products correctly and on-time.