Today, something happened that really made me think my colleague can be clueless to a new level. Material control told me that a work order's online date has expired and needs adjustment. I looked and found it's an outsourcing work order, so I intuitively went to confirm with the outsourcing production controller. As a result, his first sentence was: 'This is done in-house.'
I was a bit stunned at the moment, because this material number was clearly in the outsourcing list he gave me before, and the work order layer is also for outsourcing. Logically, it's completely an outsourcing process, but he countered with: 'Then why was it produced in-house last September?'
I almost laughed out loud. I wasn't even in the company last September, am I supposed to be psychic? And the outsourcing list was given by you, now that there's a problem, the first thing isn't to clarify, but to throw out a time point to counter-question. Is this solving the problem or shirking responsibility?
Later, he added that this material number had applied for 3C certification later, so it can't be outsourced and needs to be changed back to in-house production.
Okay, the key point finally came out, but the information about 'it was changed later' wasn't updated in the list at all, and no one synchronized it. Until the issue happened, it was concluded with 'can't be outsourced,' but this work order is only a week away from shipment, and now changing back to in-house, it's simply not in time to issue materials and arrange production.
In the end, I went to explain to production and sales and the business that this work order needs to be delayed. Facing the production and sales supervisor's questioning, I directly asked the outsourcing production controller to clarify and respond himself, because this is no longer a simple scheduling issue, but a decision error caused by information mistakes.
What made me the most angry about this whole thing isn't the sudden situation, but 'information has changed, but no one is responsible for updating it.' Everyone is just guarding their own territory, without synchronizing and conveying information, so the people behind will directly step on landmines, turning it into a chain of explosions that can't be avoided no matter how careful you are.
Also because of this, I later spoke very directly to the outsourcing production controller, asking him to reorganize and check the outsourcing list before giving it to me. Otherwise, using this as a basis is basically harming people, and in the end, the one who gets scolded is 'me for not arranging the work order online on schedule.'
At the same time, the supervisor and I also discussed with engineering whether it's possible to set up some mechanisms in the layer or system, for example, automatically send an email reminder for abnormalities if a work order hasn't been converted to outsourcing within a month, because if I used VLOOKUP to grab data before, as long as it's classified as an outsourcing material number, it would be directly filtered out, with no foolproof mechanism at all, meaning even if it's wrong, no one will notice.
In this company, there are really many things I've never encountered. A lot of the time, I'm not just scheduling, but helping to patch up the entire process. When the process isn't established and information isn't managed, all risks will pile up backward, and finally all press on scheduling and delivery dates. Then when things explode, everyone asks why you didn't notice, so whose problem is that?
But really, as a production controller, encountering such sudden situations isn't just once or twice. Even though I know the problem isn't with me, I still have to clean it up; that's probably the inevitable process of closing cases for production controllers.