The Cwedit Cwunch Ain't All Bad ...

Or that's another fine result then !

One thing that the current financial climate seems to have done, is to take customer service back a couple of decades. Big companies now seem a bit more inclined to help, to hang onto the customers that they have.

A couple of weeks back, I reported here on the excellent service I received from B&Q regarding my floor threshold. Now, I have had occasion to contact Crosswater, regarding a spare part that I needed for a bath filler assembly. Not only did a representative reply to my e-mail very quickly, he told me that if I sent him my mailing address, he would be very happy to just send me the part. It arrived today in a jiffy bag at no charge. Right part, very quick.

So my congratulations and award for outstanding customer service goes this week to Crosswater. Well done to them !

Arfa

Reply to
Arfa Daily
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Sadly there is a downside as well! I have a shredder, made in the USA, which needed the lower engine casing replacing under guarantee. The local repair company were very helpful, handling everything relating to the claim for me. Sadly however getting the part took a long time. The reason for this is that the repair company at al up the chain to and including the manufacturer have run down their stocks of spares to cut costs. As a result I had to wait for the part to come all the way down the chain.

Reply to
Broadback

Over the past couple of decades I've worked for several manufacturing companies who had adopted various stupid work philosophies such as JIT (Just in Time), TPM (Total Production Management) etc. The bottom line was that they neglected to keep anything in the stores, whether it be spare parts for equipment, basic materials to actually make the products or indeed the products themselves (in case of a rush order). It was deemed as uneconomic to forward plan!

Don.

Reply to
Don

Like all these things, there are cost benefit analyses to be done.

It doesn't make sense to NOT stock e.g screws, and it doesn't make sense TO stock complete assemblies you sell maybe once every 5 years..

As with all these things, if they get implemented by idiots who can't do sums, chaos results and profit goes down, not up.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

One example was when production came to a halt because a conveyor belt motor failed....no spare in the stores, so the nigtshift manager had to call in an agency worker who stood between two belts for four hours & manhandled plastic drums from one belt to the other until a new motor could be brought in!

Don.

Reply to
Don

trouble is firm are run by "bean counters" having the spare in stock was probably less profitable than 4 hours labour for an agency worker

a company I worked for charged firms for 24 emergency cover for computer servers and then never employed any engineers to be on standby, they would pay a fix penalty fee for missing the call out as this was cheaper than paying engineer

Reply to
Kevin

conversely when my modem got struck by lightning. it was replaced FOC 'because the amount of money we would make on service is insufficient to cover the cost of administering returns'

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

Main problem is they are implemented by wanker managers who know bugger all about the business they are in.

The 'myth of management' decrees that management is a science in itself and knowledge & experience of a specific industry isnt necessary.

Reply to
The Medway Handyman

Well that is of course completely true, in the sense that the disciplines of management are independent of any particular business, but that gets interpreted by managers to mean 'I don't need to know about your business to implement Good Management' which is of course utter bollocks.

The difference between a good manager and a bad one is that the good one is a servant of his workforce: he is there to streamline what they do by examining what goes wrong, and coming up with ways to make it right. Bad managers think in terms of leadership and authority, and issuing directives.

Like G Brown.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

The Medway Handyman coughed up some electrons that declared:

That's certainly been true of all bar one, perhaps two, of the places I've worked. Current place, the managers are the engineers, so it works.

Everywhere else, usually my immediate boss has been great, mostly because he/she has done largely the same work I did, or has done recently. Once you get a little up the chain, the clue factor seems to drop off exponentially.

Sad, but Britain's strong point is not it's ability to produce good management. For a particular case in point, look at that jerkoff who wiped out GEC after Weinstock retired.

Tim

Reply to
Tim S

look at the car industry. OK there were unions (as elsewhere) then there's management and there's finance (which seems to take the next bonus as its long term objective).

Reply to
Alex

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember "Don" saying something like:

Such things are priceless. When I was repairing lift trucks, an edict came down from HO that every van should only have one part of each spare

- that's right, van stock consisted of just one spare part of each type. Utter madness. Chaos and waste followed, as engineers had to make trips back to the depots to obtain more parts as they were needed, instead of being able to go from one job to another, as they used to. Then, the stupid bastards in charge started putting pressure on the engineers to get more billable hours in. I left that cowboy outfit to its own devices.

Reply to
Grimly Curmudgeon

Hi, I had a similar experience. The stores manager decided that we must cut down on wasteage. You were not allowed to have a new tin of WD40 from the stores unless you handed in an empty one. Later I found two of my fitters almost in tears with laughter. I was taken round the corner and saw a queue of about twenty fitters waiting by the rubbish skip. They were waiting for the stores staff to empty the empty WD40 tins into the skip. Nothing like using the system to defeat the system! Robbie

Reply to
Roberts

When I was at school, they had recently laid out a new Rugby pitch but were unable to use it as such because of a liberal seeding of Hampshire flint in this former farmland. So a standard punishment became the collection of stones from this pitch - miscreants were sent out with a bucket (or more, depending on severity of crime) to crawl along the grass picking up stones and not return until the bucket was full.

Thing is, when the full bucket was presented for inspection, the teacher involved wasn't about to go and dispose of a load of stones himself. So we'd be sent off to do that before being released, and very quickly there arose an unofficial standard dumping ground - under the hedge that ran alongside the field. Thenceforth, anyone sent on "stone-picking" simply sat under the hedge for an hour or so (probably smoking) and then filled his bucket from the vast heap of stones piled up there. Fifteen minutes later the stones would be back on the heap ready for next time.

Them were the days.

Pete

Reply to
Pete Verdon

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