When things go wrong, be truthful with the customer and have a plan!

I spent 40+ years working in the controls industry for Siemens. Let me share some lessons I learned along the way. Lesson 01

Years ago, we had a validated lab project that we were working on. It had a couple of hundred lab spaces that all had special controllers to keep them in a specific pressurized state. 

We had started up about 100 of them and the 3rd party validation air balancer were close behind.

We discovered that there was a production problem with the circuit boards and some of the parts were coming loose on some of the boards. It was only some, but we couldn't trust that it wouldn’t happen to the others over time. If it happened 6 months from now, it could affect ongoing research projects and ruin results.

We had an internal meeting right away and determined that we were going to have to correct the production error and get replacement boards. This would make all of the air balancing that was done, worthless and cost us and other trades money and delays.

A call to the home office product manager and his team resulted in a realistic but quick schedule for corrected replacements (which we padded a little just in case). We determined the time it would take to change out each board and how to schedule our people to replace all of the boards once we got them.

This was all done between 7:00 am and 2 pm of the same day. Obviously things don’t always go that well.

At our 3:00 project meeting with the customer and mechanical contractor, we presented the problem (no one was aware yet), our solution, impact and timeline. Of course they were all very upset as it was going to impact the project schedule.

After the meeting, the customer came up to me and said something to the effect of ‘That's why we are glad we have Siemens on this job. You have a major problem, but owned it, didn't hide it, and brought us a solution and timeline. So although we are upset we are also confident you will get it done.'

I always remembered that.... we were actually pretty proud.

Be truthful and have a plan - stuff happens!!