"Prepping for Takeoff"
Jim had signed his distributor agreement. Now that he knew the distributor’s needs, he was all set to get the product manufactured. Manufacturing didn’t go as smoothly as he had hoped.
Jim and his team had little experience with manufacturing this type of good. They thought buying from a factory in volume should be simple.
The manufacturer had promised the product within three weeks. With the changes that Jim emailed, the manufacturer expanded the time to five weeks. Jim wasn’t worried, he had plenty of time to deliver to the distributor.
Once a week, Jim would stay up late and talk with the manufacturer to get an update. In the first two weeks, things seemed to be ongoing as planned. In the third week, the manufacturer sent him an email explaining that one of the manufacturing steps wasn’t working.
Jim talked with the manufacturer’s salesperson on video chat. Helen (her English name), explained that their machines weren’t performing one of the steps correctly and that their engineers were trying to understand how to fix the problem. She asked Jim to be patient.
Jim hoped that this was just a short delay. Adam and Susan were pondering about how to promote the product without irritating the retail channel.
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