It is hard enough running a business sticking to a set budget, but is doubly hard when staff make stupid mistakes. I have known established businesses who are no longer around today because they never worried about the back end of the business and concentrated on the front end. The front end generates your profits so it is doubly important you hold onto them by managing the back end which is your costs. The one business had been functioning for 40 years with 90 branches and over 1500 staff and I could have told them 5 years before they closed that their business was in trouble just by how they ordered their packaging materials. The staff did not care and they were too big too fail.
This week we had two instances where pallets were sent to the wrong destinations which is a train wreck when they are in the wrong provinces. The cost more than doubles and my estimate of a $1K mistake will be close. The staff member in question has only been kept on because of her age being 70 and she would be in shit street if we had to let her go.
This decision is not ours entirely as she works for our client and they pay her salary. The problem is she sent these pallets to their head office instead of their clients retail outlet so there is nowhere to hide with this mistake. We had no part of this mistake yet because we are being paid for the back end services we will ultimately pay the bill.
Mistakes happen and as long as you learn from them by being accountable and owning up immediately I have no serious issue with them. If the mistakes continue however that is a totally different story as there is no ways we can carry these errors and her employment would be terminated.
Our client has learned some painful mistakes of late with at least 160 online orders having been cancelled. The problem was their admin was working far too slow and were literally processing the sales 48 hours after the orders had been placed. They should have seen this coming because it was only by being honest and telling them they were useless was this now rectified. Their admin staff processing the orders has now been skipped entirely and things are back on track. This is a different type of staff issue and it is more a managerial and understanding the business type of problem.
I have no idea how much this has cost them in lost sales, but it is a dam sight more than the $1K and why I believe she will survive and get away with her mistakes. Again the cancelled orders have a back end cost because we still have to prepare them for collection only to place the items back in stock. The double work do does not make things easy and why a meeting in the New Year will be interesting to say the least. Maybe a crash course in how a warehouse actually works with them donning overalls would be a help. The front end needs to know how the back end works for the business to function as one.
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