Boardrooms Rule

Photo John Madden

I joined a manufacturer of aluminium doors and windows around 5 years into my working life. After a couple of years as a management cadet with a plastics company, and having picked up some useful skills in production planning from both my employer and night school classes I'd got restless at the poor pay that good jobs returned compared to "unskilled" occupations. My brother was working in a car plant assembling BMC motorcars and I joined him for 6 months. The better hourly rate bolstered by regular overtime helped my wife and me save the money needed to buy a first house. And raise a first child.

At the end of the six months I left the car plant to be the production planner for the aluminium company, my first assignment where I was in charge of a function. Less than a year into that role the management asked me to take on the Purchasing Officer's job as the incumbent was about to be dismissed. What knowledge I had came from academic study and inventory management as a production planner. Naturally I was all over it. It didn't take long to discover the old buyer had been a tad generous with the stock levels and also seemed to have bought stuff that we never used. Over 12 months I peeled the stock levels down, began building relationships with suppliers and sorted the manual card systems used to track orders and stock. Two years on somebody else took on the production planning and I picked up the Sales Administration role, along with two women as staff.

I got pretty good at both roles in part because I enjoyed dealing with people and because management allowed me room to change things and innovate. Unsurprisingly aluminium formed the largest buying commitment, but second was the plastics which were used as weather seals and gaskets. These were all extruded which was the manufacturing method I'd started my working life with.

This was the age of the travelling representative, the sales rep, and I regularly got visits from new reps looking to grow their business. One day a man called me for an appointment. He had been making trial runs of window gaskets for a small window company using the same material that was used on oven door seals. He claimed it was much easier to fit, more durable and sealed better than the plasticised PVC version most of the industry used. Eventually he and I agreed that his company would make a sample run and I would give a box of this gasket to one of our agents to use and report on its suitability. The agent was enthusiastic, and I placed an order. 

For a while I was buying both the old gasket from Company F and the new one from Company E. When the rest of our agents started getting shipments of the new gaskets they didn't want the old one. Company E also offered a new advantage; they would make and stock the gasket themselves and ship it direct to my customers, and only charge me when they shipped to my customer. At the time I was obliged to buy 1 months stock from Company F and had to place the order 3 months before delivery. Company E took all that away; they would manage the inventory and all I had to do was pass on customer orders for immediate shipment. Goodbye lead time for everybody!

I began to order other gaskets from Company E. Inevitably Company F noticed the fall in purchases but the sales rep didn't ask me what was going on. He whined to his manager who in turn  bleated to his managing director. Company F was part of one of New Zealand's largest industrial groups. My employer was part of another large industrial conglomerate. What I didn't know was that these two groups shared a couple of directors. After a board meeting of Big Group F, over cigars and brandy one assumes, a director of F asked a director of my Big Group if their little aluminium company was losing sales. Much perturbed the director called my Managing Director who quickly scuttled  round to me. "What's happening?" he asked. I told him. "Well, stop it" he said. He told me to ask Company F to try to make gaskets from the same superior material and if it was OK then everything was to go back the way it was. "What about the inventory management?" I asked. "Get F to do that as well."

Eventually F came close with the gasket material, and I managed to persuade my MD to let me leave some business with Company E. Company F wouldn't offer the exact deal that E did; they still wanted us to issue orders 3 months ahead, and their price was slightly higher than E. But they won. Me? I learnt that personal relationships can override what is best for business, the founder of Company E thought I was a bit of a shit, and I had an early experience of what very soon became the model for all our supplier relationships, and for many other companies besides.

In fact the inventory/supply change altered the industry and my job. My Big Group owned two other brands of aluminium joinery, both operating the way I was. The Big Group did the obvious and shut the lot of them, established a small group to manage the buying, planning and sales administration for all three brands. A lot of people lost jobs, though I kept mine. It wasn't hellish enjoyable and in a few months I was head hunted by one of the world's biggest IT corporations and entered a new trade which I have yet to leave.