By Chad Waldo

The story is almost a cliché these days; the customer needs parts yesterday and you have a week’s worth of production left.
It was a typical Monday morning when we got the call from the Norfolk Naval shipyard. There was a container ship leaving 10 days from Monday, and our parts needed to be on that ship. Production was still in process and would be finished Thursday afternoon. With that in mind, we told the procurement officer that there shouldn’t be a problem and hung up the phone. But upon checking the parts list for that order, we quickly discovered that there were two parts which required heat treating.
It wasn’t until we called our outside heat treating service company that we realized we had a big problem. Their current backlog was one week. There was no way to make the boat unless the parts were completed and out by Tuesday. We were at least two days short of time.
One constant truth about manufacturing I have found is that you always have options. Ours were to either ship the parts late and lose the contract, speed up the manufacturing process or heat treat the parts in house. With a limited window of only a few hours to make this decision, we dissected the choices, one at a time. Option one was out of the question; we simply could not afford to lose the contract. We quickly discovered that speeding up manufacturing wasn’t possible without shutting down several other jobs that were just as hot. In the end, the only option that made sense was heat treating the components in-house quickly.
We already had some of the equipment in place to make heat treating feasible, but we had no idea if it would work right. For our socket production line, we had installed a furnace next one of our punch presses. This setup was used to heat blanks up to 1800 degrees Fahrenheit. There was a large hood over the furnace to pull out heat and gas. We had access to several air lines, and one gas line could be tapped into if needed. With that layout in mind, we had the rest of the afternoon to figure out the best method to finish the parts in-house.

I am a bookkeeper with a small company. My boss, one of three brothers who own the business, is married with three kids. Last month, he asked me to place a considerably younger woman, whom I have never seen in our shop, on the payroll. A work associate told me the woman is my boss’s mistress. I processed an expense account report for a tradeshow trip, and I noticed dinner receipts for two and hotel bills showing double occupancy. I knew his wife was home with the kids during the show because I saw her that week at the hockey complex where our kids play. His two brothers are absentee owners (both get paychecks) whom I don’t think would approve of their brother’s actions. Should I confront my boss? Should I tell his brothers? The amount is not huge, but it’s better than my paycheck. The work associate says my boss is an adulterer who is using the company’s money to fund his own indiscretions, and I ought to report it to his brothers.















