Learning who carries the assumption

My first production schedule looked more certain than the factory it described. It had dates, quantities and machine assignments, and I had checked the arithmetic carefully. Then a tool arrived with a modification that was not reflected in the setup instructions. The job could not start as planned. I was a junior planner, with no authority to decide whether the change was acceptable, but I had already allowed its expected completion to support promises elsewhere in the schedule. I learnt that a plan can distribute an assumption much faster than an organisation can verify it.

I joined Velnori Toolworks in June 1994 after a production-engineering diploma at Tiraven Technical Institute. My work was to assemble schedules from customer requirements, material availability and the shop’s view of capacity. I sat with experienced setters to understand why two jobs that looked similar in a spreadsheet could require very different preparation. A machine hour was not always interchangeable with another machine hour, and the person able to make a difficult changeover could be a more important constraint than the equipment itself. I began recording those qualifications instead of leaving them in conversations.

In January 2000 I became supply planning manager. The role added responsibility for eighteen colleagues and the coordination of materials and customer call-offs. I found that the word forecast could carry several meanings. A buyer might mean an indication for discussion, a salesperson might hear a likely order and a planner might use it to justify reserving material. I asked the team to preserve the original status of a demand signal as it moved through our process. That made some reports less comfortable, but it reduced the number of decisions resting on a commitment nobody had actually made.

Commercial leadership followed in January 2007. I wanted to understand the negotiation that produced the assumptions operations inherited. It was easy to criticise a quotation after the order arrived and harder to offer a workable alternative while the customer was comparing suppliers. I learnt to separate the price of a part from the obligations attached to its programme: dedicated capacity, customer-funded tooling, engineering changes and the arrangements at the end of production. Those discussions sometimes slowed a sale. They also gave us a better chance of explaining a later disagreement without discovering that each side had relied on a different unwritten understanding.

I left Velnori in July 2013 to run Cadrivane Assemblies in Malaysia. The business combined purchased components with our own production, and its performance depended on coordination across companies as much as work within the plant. As general manager I could no longer resolve a problem by saying that the commercial or supply function should have handled it differently. I owned the business result. I spent time with programme leaders who could show how a decision moved from a customer conversation into materials, tooling and the working instructions used by operators. That ability became an important part of how I assessed managers.

Selvarune’s board approached me during its founder succession in 2019. The company had strong technical relationships and a history of solving customer problems through personal commitment. A long-term industrial investor had become the majority owner, and the board wanted a chief executive who could retain that responsiveness while making obligations less dependent on the founder’s memory. I joined in January 2020. I did not arrive with a proposal to standardise every customer agreement. I wanted the organisation to know which differences were deliberate, who had approved them and what they required from the factory.

The tooling review was an early example. Physical possession of a tool did not settle who owned it, which modifications had been authorised or what we were expected to do when a programme ended. Commercial colleagues worried that reopening old records would disturb relationships that were working. I understood the concern and asked that we approach the exercise through specific unresolved obligations, with appropriate advice, rather than accuse customers or staff of having failed. Some cases remained open. That was a more honest position than a complete register built on assumptions we could not defend.

I now spend much of my time on the capability needed to keep a production promise repeatable. It includes technical skill, commercial clarity and the confidence to report that an apparent agreement is incomplete. The strongest managers I have worked with can explain both the customer’s reason for asking and the factory’s reason for hesitating. I want Selvarune to retain that judgement as people move on, so that responsiveness becomes an organisational capability rather than a request for the same experienced colleague to solve one more difficult job.

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