Open Letter to Enterprise Rent a Car

Dear Enterprise:

I have to love your business decision to not put a spare tire in your cars anymore. I suppose it shows confidence in the tire industry which shows the progress it has made in the last few decades.

And your further business decision to charge extra for "road rescue" service means that if your car does have a flat tire you make your customers have your cars towed to your place to get them fixed at their expense.

I suppose the calculation you make is that for the time being the number of customers you tick off and will never rent from you again is smaller than the amount you make and save in by not having good customer service.

I guess your risk management people used to work for one of the cellphone companies.

Open Letter to Berkshire Hathaway Home Services

So if I am to get this straight:

Despite me paying about $20K in rent over the next year, and you getting 10% of it (about $2000) whatever you were doing on Monday afternoon was more important than meeting with a potential client.

Well, Sissy, Berkshire Hathaway Home Services will hear of this.

Jim

Honda Recalls 143,000 Vehicles In Japan, Image On the Rocks?

Honda Motor Co. recalled about 143,000 vehicles in Japan after air bags made by Daicel Corp. — a rival of troubled Takata Corp. — failed to deploy in an accident, Bloomberg reported Thursday. The recall followed confirmation Wednesday of a death in the U.S., the tenth involving a ruptured Takata air-bag inflator in the country.

 Link to Story

So many questions.This is the "real" version of something that happens in my you tube story (the iso9001:2015 transition playlist). What do you wager that the root cause is the same? 

Check my YouTube channel www.YouTube.com/getisohelp and click the Transition playlist (the fun starts at about part 15)

Dear AT and T

The crew you had laying the new fiber optic cable today cut through the old one.

Of the 10 or so on the crew none could speak English.

They tried to fix the old fiber optic cable by peeling back the cover, twisting the strands together and taping it.

You have the worst customer service in America but you don't care because we just buy your products anyway.

At some point this will all catch up with you.

What drives an ISO auditor crazy...

There are abundant work instructions all nasty and greasy on a row of welders... But no one has a complete set. No work instruction for machine #1.

"Where is the work instruction for that part?'

The quality manager says "oh, it's on the line somewhere. Maybe at another machine. The official version is in the computer anyway."

"Then why do you bother to laminate some of them, and hang them up out there?"

"Well the engineer is from a well-known Asian country and he is used to it."

"And does it bother him that they are not complete?"

"He does not know the difference. Anyway that is not his responsibility"

"And do you not find it difficult to get your workers to pay ANY attention to ANY instructions? "

"No they have all been here for years. If we want to do something different we just tell them.'

" and so why don't you just take them all down? They are filthy and cluttering up the place."

"The Asians"

"So what if there are some obsolete ones?"

" we try to take the obsolete ones out"

"So these things are for decorative purposes. "

"Basically"

"So is there any impact on quality from all of this?"

"No. In fact 90 percent of our customer complaints have disappeared since they announced the closing. "

"Closing?"

"They are closing the plant. Model year phase out and they don't feel like spending the maintenance budget to bring in new models".

Me (thinking): " maybe, just maybe bad housekeeping or resistance to manufacturing discipline...or spending a lot of overhead money on work instructions that are ignored... Is not a good thing...

Dear Detroit

Thanks for letting me visit without incident yesterday. I made it up Gratiot and down 8 mile without seeing either Eminem or Diana Ross or being held up by zombies.

I suppose there is plenty of whining about how you got into the condition you are in. I go into chaotic places all the time, and the root cause of most organizational decline, whether it be a civilization, a city, or a little machine shop is that you stubbornly expected to be able do the same things that originally made you successful forever. We know how that worked.

So now what? Why does it not get better? The lone answer is: you tolerate mediocrity.  Your citizens are so beaten down that they accept their community being the way it is.

Sorry I can't be more helpful. I do have a suggestion though. Come up with some measurements of effectiveness, and set up programs to improve. Determine what needs to be done, by when, assign accountability, dedicate resources to improvement (rather than stadiums) and do not take "we can't" for an answer. Do not expect the rest of us to solve your problems. Expect commitment  from everybody.  Audit yourself occasionally.

Sound familiar?

http://all-that-is-interesting.com/abandoned-detroit-photos

Pizza Recall

http://www.fsis.usda.gov/wps/wcm/connect/FSIS-Content/internet/main/topics/recalls-and-public-health-alerts/recall-case-archive/archive/2016/recall-024-2016-release

To you and me, five truckloads of screwed up pizza is a lot, but in the grand immensity of the mass produced and distributed food industry it is not even a blip on the radar...