Why Manufacturers Miss Delivery Dates: 5 Root Causes

The truck left late. Follow a Wadeville manufacturer’s story tracing one missed deadline back to 5 upstream issues.

Thandi Molefe owns Steel & Sheet in Wadeville; 31 people making heavy-duty warehouse racking. In early May she landed a good one, 40 racks for a new logistics hub near Paarl. Delivery was critical, Friday 10am, so their installer team could fit them before stock arrived.

She promised on-time.

The truck left late, but not because of traffic. Because of five things upstream that nobody saw as connected.

1. Purchasing stalled.

On Monday the steel supplier emailed, price for 6m square tube up 6%, quote valid for 24 hours. Thandi was on site in Germiston measuring. Joseph in the office did not want to approve the higher price without her. He waited. By Tuesday morning the quote had expired. New quote, new approval, plus a COD requirement because the account was over limit. Steel that should have been cut on Monday only arrived Wednesday at 11am. Two days lost before a single weld.

2. Inventory lied.

The cut list needed 800 M8 high-tensile bolt sets. The stock sheet on the wall said 200 in bin B4. When they went to pick them, there were 40. The rest had been used on Friday for an urgent gate job and never booked out. Elmarie had to phone Bolt & Nut in Jet Park for an emergency buy, but they were on stocktake until 2pm. Bolts arrived Wednesday at 3:30pm. The racks stood assembled but loose; waiting.

3. A hidden production bottleneck.

One welder, Samuel, is coded to do the load-bearing welds for this spec. He is also the only one who can finish a custom staircase that pays double margin. There were no formal job cards, just jobs shouted across the shop. Samuel split his day, half on stairs, half on racks. On paper both jobs were running... in reality both were waiting. The racks queued for 18 hours.

4. The invisible queue outside the factory.

Thandi outsources powder coating to a shop in Alrode. She dropped the first 20 frames on Thursday morning. What she did not know is that the coater had a big solar farm order ahead of her, and no system to tell her. Her frames sat in a corner until Friday morning. No call, no update — she only found out when she drove there herself.

5. Quality and dispatch collided at the end.

At final assembly on Friday at 9:00, 8 racks were 12mm out of square. The welding jig had slipped on Wednesday and no one rechecked it.

Cut, re-square, re-weld, and while fixing that, Thandi also realised that no delivery note or waybill had been prepared, and the truck she thought she booked for Thursday was actually booked for Saturday.

The driver could only come at 2pm and the truck eventually left Wadeville at 14:30 on Friday. It arrived in Paarl almost 32 hours after the Friday 10am deadline. The installer team had left and the disappointed client had to pay a second day rate. Thandi had to discount the order.

That evening Thandi sat on a rack on the empty floor. The late delivery was not a transport problem. It was a purchasing delay that became an inventory shortage that became a production bottleneck that became an external queue that became rework. One late truck was just the last symptom.

Conclusion

One missed deadline, 5 upstream issues … late deliveries are so often just the symptoms of other issues. 

Next week: Next week Thandi fix her upstream issues with the help of Flōware.co.za