The story has it that Federal Express has its bad day some time back when its shipments processing line was shut down due to faults that no in-house engineer could pinpoint, much less solving it at their Headquarter shipment & distribution plant in Memphis, Tenn., United States.
Their boss, Mr. Smith was very concerned as every hour of downtime would costs FedEx in excess of U$50,000 and the faulty conveyance belt that has brought down the entire shipments & distribution processing line are yet to be rectified in its 5th hour by now.
FedEx has estimated to have already lost some U$ 250,000 to U$ 300,000 in the forms of compensations due to late shipments & deferred deliveries, not to mention the loss of business opportunities and customers’ confidence. A rather senior & experienced engineer, Sam was immediately flown in to troubleshoot the faults and to subsequently advise Mr. Smith on the matter.
He immediately worked on the shipments processing line and zero in onto the conveyance belts logic systems that drive & control the entire systems, making all the necessary adjustments & fine-tuning along the way and in less than 20 minutes from the time he stepped into the plant, the entire shipments processing line was in motion again.
Loud applauses from the processing line workers were heard and Mr. Smith immediately rush down from his office in the top floor to greet and thanks Sam for solving FedEx’s problem with the shipments processing line.
Of course, Mr. Smith were eager to listen to Sam on the matter and just before that, his secretary passed him a U$10,000 bill that Sam, the engineer has given her earlier before Mr. Smith reached him. He looked into the bill, displayed no surprise and asked Sam if he could kindly itemize his bill so as to make it easy for his accountant to answer to the auditors.
He came back to him with his very interesting itemized bill as follows:
U$ 1.00 for turning the screw on shipments processing logic board
U$ 9,999 for knowing exactly the right screw to turn
U$ 10,000 Hence the Total Bill being …
Mr. Smith found Sam’s bill rather eye-opening and radical in its itemization and made a note that all his executives throughout the company must learn from this insightful experience.
In perspective, most of the in-house engineers that were called before Sam know that the fault was with the logic boards but no one knows which screw to tune that makes all the difference. Similarly, most people know the successes of their business lies with the key result areas (KRA) but few know what these key result areas (KRA) are. Much fewer people will actually take the trouble to learn what these key result areas are.
Their boss, Mr. Smith was very concerned as every hour of downtime would costs FedEx in excess of U$50,000 and the faulty conveyance belt that has brought down the entire shipments & distribution processing line are yet to be rectified in its 5th hour by now.
FedEx has estimated to have already lost some U$ 250,000 to U$ 300,000 in the forms of compensations due to late shipments & deferred deliveries, not to mention the loss of business opportunities and customers’ confidence. A rather senior & experienced engineer, Sam was immediately flown in to troubleshoot the faults and to subsequently advise Mr. Smith on the matter.
He immediately worked on the shipments processing line and zero in onto the conveyance belts logic systems that drive & control the entire systems, making all the necessary adjustments & fine-tuning along the way and in less than 20 minutes from the time he stepped into the plant, the entire shipments processing line was in motion again.
Loud applauses from the processing line workers were heard and Mr. Smith immediately rush down from his office in the top floor to greet and thanks Sam for solving FedEx’s problem with the shipments processing line.
Of course, Mr. Smith were eager to listen to Sam on the matter and just before that, his secretary passed him a U$10,000 bill that Sam, the engineer has given her earlier before Mr. Smith reached him. He looked into the bill, displayed no surprise and asked Sam if he could kindly itemize his bill so as to make it easy for his accountant to answer to the auditors.
He came back to him with his very interesting itemized bill as follows:
U$ 1.00 for turning the screw on shipments processing logic board
U$ 9,999 for knowing exactly the right screw to turn
U$ 10,000 Hence the Total Bill being …
Mr. Smith found Sam’s bill rather eye-opening and radical in its itemization and made a note that all his executives throughout the company must learn from this insightful experience.
In perspective, most of the in-house engineers that were called before Sam know that the fault was with the logic boards but no one knows which screw to tune that makes all the difference. Similarly, most people know the successes of their business lies with the key result areas (KRA) but few know what these key result areas (KRA) are. Much fewer people will actually take the trouble to learn what these key result areas are.
No comments:
Post a Comment