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I work for a furniture manufacturer. We make Uber expensive office furniture. Each station of furniture in this story cost $38K and change. Each station is a large wall unit with overhead storage, storage towers at both ends, and lateral files under the worksurface, it also has a desk running off the right end making it into an L shape. Because the desk runs off the right hand side, it is called a right hand desk. Common sense right? Here is a little timeline of what happened in what order.
1) The Dealer sends in drawing of one right hand desk unit and asks for a quote for 6 desks.
2) I do a quote for all the pieces needed, and generate a drawing of the Right hand desk. The quote says right at the top “Right Hand Desk” and all the pieces are quantity 6.
3) They place a Purchase Order for 6 of every piece to make a right hand desk.
4) We send them shop drawings of the right hand station to sign off on.
5) We spend 8 weeks custom building their stations.
6) We ship their 6 stations to New York City.
7) They lug 6 stations of furniture up to the 40ish floor of some building.
8) They un-crate the pieces.
9) They set up 3 stations without a problem.
10) They start to set up the 4th station, and things didn’t seem to go together right. Everything looked backwards.
11) They looked at the drawings and discovered the problem. Between step 2 and step 3 there had been a meeting where they decided that they wanted a symmetrical row of desks, so they wanted 3 rights and 3 lefts, not 6 rights. However, that was never communicated to us, so we never revised our quote, and they wrote their PO to match the quote.
12) We showed them how they could flip some components around, but that would change the look of the station a lot, and they would have to order about 60% of the station again for the components that are not reversible.
13) The interior designer dug her heels into the ground and demanded that we make entirely new stations for her.
Until that point we were going to give her a 40% discount on the replacement parts. When she refused to be reasonable we decided that 10% was a better idea. In other words, she made a mistake that cost her just over $102K.
Oops.
All those VP’s that are currently sitting at backwards desks are about to have the three best furnished secretaries in all of NYC.
1) The Dealer sends in drawing of one right hand desk unit and asks for a quote for 6 desks.
2) I do a quote for all the pieces needed, and generate a drawing of the Right hand desk. The quote says right at the top “Right Hand Desk” and all the pieces are quantity 6.
3) They place a Purchase Order for 6 of every piece to make a right hand desk.
4) We send them shop drawings of the right hand station to sign off on.
5) We spend 8 weeks custom building their stations.
6) We ship their 6 stations to New York City.
7) They lug 6 stations of furniture up to the 40ish floor of some building.
8) They un-crate the pieces.
9) They set up 3 stations without a problem.
10) They start to set up the 4th station, and things didn’t seem to go together right. Everything looked backwards.
11) They looked at the drawings and discovered the problem. Between step 2 and step 3 there had been a meeting where they decided that they wanted a symmetrical row of desks, so they wanted 3 rights and 3 lefts, not 6 rights. However, that was never communicated to us, so we never revised our quote, and they wrote their PO to match the quote.
12) We showed them how they could flip some components around, but that would change the look of the station a lot, and they would have to order about 60% of the station again for the components that are not reversible.
13) The interior designer dug her heels into the ground and demanded that we make entirely new stations for her.
Until that point we were going to give her a 40% discount on the replacement parts. When she refused to be reasonable we decided that 10% was a better idea. In other words, she made a mistake that cost her just over $102K.
Oops.
All those VP’s that are currently sitting at backwards desks are about to have the three best furnished secretaries in all of NYC.
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