Chapter 1
You Be the Supervisor
“Well, if you’re so smart, why don’t you be the supervisor?”
That’s how this all started four months before. Rocky blurted it out. Now I was wondering why on earth I’d said OK.
All I’d done was make a suggestion to him about the way he’d assigned the work to our team. The way he’d done it, Sylvie was going to be waiting around for Giles to finish his work, and I suggested that I help Giles finish up his task and then go back to my work. Otherwise, I figured, we weren’t going to get that order out on time.
Impulsively, I said, “Sure.” I didn’t have a clue what I was getting into!
Four months later, our department is slowing down the company’s shipments. I’d just learned that the third important shipment this month would be late. I had a team of six people (Marcus, Steve, Zhou, and Jas, as well as Giles and Sylvie) who were waiting for me to tell them what to do to fix the situation, and I sensed that they would rather not talk to me at all. It was a far cry from four months before when I was friends with them all.
Now, Mrs. Kumar, the owner, wanted to speak with me that afternoon. I was dreading it.
Let me back up and introduce myself. Trevor Bains. I’m 28. I supervise the Raw Stock department of the Sussex Creek Boatworks, where we make a variety of wooden toy boats. We use all reclaimed wood. They’re pretty high-end toys – they sell for $75–$100 each, and we ship them all over the world. I’ve been working here for five years.
Growing up, my dad and I made stuff in his basement workshop. I don’t remember learning to use a saw or a plane, but by the time I was 11, Dad let me use the tools on my own, except the Skil saw and the radial arm saw. We made all kinds of things: a wagon, tables, puzzles, and so on. A beautiful radio-controlled glider that we made together before he died, when I was 15, still sits on my dresser.
Learning all that from my dad, art and shop were my favourite subjects at school. I started studying business administration at college, but there was way too much sitting for my liking. I left half way through second year, without a Plan B.
A high-school buddy had landed a job at a ski resort and said they were looking for some labourers, so I went to the mountains. It was a great winter. The work was intense and physical every night once the lifts closed. We’d collapse into bed about midnight, and then we were the first ones going up the lifts in the morning. Come the summer, I hung around and got odd jobs around the resort. Then I spent another winter at the resort. I was driving one of the snow groomers, so the work was physically easier, but boy do those things throw you around a lot. Like sitting in a kitchen mixer. And they’re noisy.
It was pretty easy to just slide along and do the same thing the third winter. But somewhere about March that year I realized that I didn’t want to do that for the rest of my life. I finished the season and came home to visit my Mum and to think about what next.
A couple of months after I got home, Mum told me Mrs. Kumar had an opening if I was interested. The Kumars are some of our oldest friends. She and my mum became friends when I was in elementary school and they were on the Parent Advisory Committee together.
Mrs. Kumar came here as a refugee twenty-one years ago. Her son and I were in the same class. She and her husband both worked multiple jobs and went to night school to work on their English. Later I learned that she was an accountant in her home country, and he was a professor of chemistry. Four years after they arrived, they bought a small cabinet shop. They were smart, they worked hard, they made good quality products, and they were good at sales. The shop grew. Then about ten years ago Mr. Kumar got cancer and died. With Mum having lost Dad three years before, their friendship blossomed.
Mrs. Kumar carried on. Four years ago, she started up Sussex Creek Boatworks to use up the solid wood offcuts from the cabinet shop. That business took off, and now they go to cabinet shops all over the region to get enough raw material!
Not having anything else to do, I said OK. I started as a general labourer. I swept floors, emptied dust collectors, moved material through the plant, drove the company truck to collect offcuts and do deliveries, and whatever else needed doing. Rocky was the General Manager. I guess he saw that I wasn’t afraid of hard work, so he kept giving me more tasks.
Then one day, about eight months after I started, when he was desperate to meet a shipping deadline, one of the saw operators called in sick. He asked me if I’d ever used wood working tools, and of course I said yes. He put me on the table saw and gave me a pile of scraps to size. I finished the lot in a couple of hours and came looking for him. He was surprised that I had already finished. After he had checked the dimensions he gave me the closest Rocky ever came to praise. “Hmmff,” he said. “I guess that’ll do.”
That was the turning point. Over time I wound up working on all seven of the machines in the Raw Stock department. We sorted the raw offcuts by nominal size, joined them into lengths, and then converted them into rough parts for the toy boats.
Then I started working in other parts of the shop. It usually happened because Rocky was short staffed, or he had his back against the wall for some delivery deadline. After three years I’d done every job in the shop. I could even tell you who had done the previous step in the process, just by the quality of the work!
Then, as I mentioned, I made a suggestion to Rocky about how he might organize the work so we’d get an order out. He retorted, “Well if you’re so smart, why don’t you be the supervisor.”
Without any thought, I blurted out, “Sure.”
Chapter 2
The First Four Months
The day after Rocky made me supervisor things started going worse.
One of our suppliers phoned and told us that a delivery of wood we were expecting was going to be late by a day. Something about a flat tire on the delivery truck. It didn’t really matter why; we were going to be out of raw material.
All of a sudden, the team was standing around asking me what they should do. I figured my job was to keep them busy, so I quickly came up with tasks for each person. Some cleaning. Some maintenance. But as I know now, none of it did anything to get product shipped. The team knew it, too. They poked along. At the end of the day when people went home, very little had been accomplished. Their heads hung as they slouched out of the plant.
Late that afternoon, Peter came by. He runs the assembly area. “I didn’t see anything come to our area for assembly today,” he said. “What’s up?”
I explained the situation. “You might have let me know,” he said. I could tell he was annoyed.
“Sorry,” I mumbled.
“Sorry doesn’t help me with my crew,” he retorted, and stomped off, shaking his head.
Things were pretty chaotic the rest of that week. The Finishing department didn’t have enough to keep them busy. We were late with a whole lot of shipments. And we had to do a whack of overtime to make up for the delay.
That was my first week. I didn’t think I’d be supervisor very long if that happened again.
I was determined to show them I could do this, so I went up to Sally’s office. She did our buying.
“Sally, can you do me a favour?”
“Sure,” she said, brightly, “As long as its legal, moral, and doesn’t exceed my spending limit.” She grinned. Sally was always smiling. It was worth going to her office just to say “hi” to her.
“I ran out of raw material when that truck broke down at the start of this week, and we just kept tripping over ourselves trying to recover. I don’t want to do that again. Could we get some of our suppliers to give us an extra supply, or speed up their next deliveries a bit, so we have some extra in stock?”
“Leave it with me,” she said. “I don’t see a problem. They’re always asking if we want more and usually I have to hold them off. Give me a day and I’ll see what I can do.”
Wonderful – or so I thought. Until truck after truck arrived earlier than we expected. We had six companies that supplied most of our offcuts, and they all sent trucks a few days early. We also had another dozen companies that occasionally sent us offcuts. Within two weeks, half of them had jumped at the chance to send us an extra load.
We had so much wood that we didn’t know where to put it all. We were tripping over it. Marcus, our primary forklift driver, was now spending all day moving pallets of offcuts around so we could do work.
Rocky came out to the shop to find me.
“How’s the supervisor doing?” he sneered. “Got it all under control?”
“Well, it’s OK, I think. I’ve made sure that we don’t run out of wood again. That was a real problem two weeks ago. And the machines all seem to be running well. I’ve been getting Peter everything he needs.”
“Sure,” he snarled. I didn’t like his tone. I’ve worked with Rocky a long time, and I know if you get on his bad side he can be really harsh. I’d pretty much escaped in my first five years here, but maybe that time was over.
“And I guess you think it’s OK to have the shop and the yard plugged full of wood? Do you know what this has cost the company?”
“What do you mean?” I was confused. “We just pay for the wood like we always do.”
“We just pay for the wood like we always do,” Rocky mimicked with a sneer. “Hardly. We’ve spent twice as much on wood in the last two weeks as we usually do. That’s drained our cash account and now we’re into our line of credit, instead of having cash in the bank. We’ll see how Mrs. Kumar likes that.” He turned and walked away.
“Wait,” I called out. But he just kept going.
Now I had two problems. Too much wood that I was having to move around all the time, and too much money spent on wood that was pushing the company into using its line of credit. I knew how much I disliked dipping into my overdraft; I could just imagine that Mrs. Kumar had the same feeling.
This supervising was getting complicated.
And so it went. Week after week I kept stumbling into more and more issues where I bumbled. My team kept coming to me for the answers, and since I thought supervisors had to have the answers, I’d come up with something.
Six weeks into the new role, Rocky asked me to come to his office. I saw Mrs. Kumar through the gap in the door. I swallowed hard, and walked in.
As soon as I was seated, Mrs. Kumar began. “Trevor, I know Rocky has given you an opportunity to be the Raw Stock supervisor. I really hope you can be successful. But the results right now are not promising. Did you know that our conversion costs for raw stock last month were 20% higher than they’ve been up until now? How has that happened?”
“Uh… uh…” I stammered. I didn’t know! I thought back over the month. Then the light bulb went on for me. When I got all the extra wood in, Marcus had gone from spending a couple of hours a day doing forklift duties to virtually full time. To make up for his “absence” from the production side, I’d asked Peter if he had someone I could borrow. So, Ravi had come over to my department and had proved very capable. Technically, he was still one of Peter’s team, but he was working for me four days out of five. I’d also noticed that the people on my team were less efficient because they were often waiting for Marcus to move a pallet for them so they could get what they needed. We’d been doing some overtime as a consequence. I hadn’t really thought about it that much. But here it was in black and white. Costs up 20%.
I explained this to Mrs. Kumar. Rocky smirked. He almost seemed to enjoy watching me squirm.
“He’s not as smart as he thinks, eh, Mrs. K.” He smiled. “Still has something to learn. He thought he knew more than me. Phah…”
Mrs. Kumar turned to Rocky. “That’s enough,” she said sharply. “I don’t recall you being perfect when you started here. And I expect more respect from you to your staff.”
I stared at her. She had cut him off at the knees. In front of me! I didn’t like where I thought this would go.
“Rocky, have you been helping Trevor learn his new role?” she asked.
“Of course,” he replied. “I come over pretty often and let him know what he needs to fix.”
Well that was a bit of a stretch on both counts. He came over often enough to keep the plant going, and he’d point out what was going wrong, but it sure didn’t feel like I was getting any guidance. I thought the best thing for me to do was keep my mouth shut.
Mrs. Kumar continued. “Trevor, I need you to keep a steady flow of parts to the assembly area, based on our orders. If you get ahead it doesn’t help us because we can’t ship any faster than we can assemble, and of course we can’t ship to people who haven’t ordered yet.” She smiled. “If you get behind, well, you’ve started to see the impact it has. Our customers get grumpy. They have a lot of other places they can buy cheaper toys. Or they just buy a different gift. ...
