VELOCITY - DEE JACOB [22]
“Well, brace yourself, Murph, because it gets worse,” said Jayro.
Murphy tossed aside a perfectly clean rib bone and shook his head.
“All right, I’m braced,” said Murphy. “Hit me.”
“The order Quincy was calling about, it’s got a spec that calls for one of those twenty-three-hour soaks in Godzilla.”
“Oh, gosh dang it,” said Murphy, along with a few other less printable expletives. “Jayro, did you make any promises?”
“You can bet my bottom I did not,” said Jayro. “I told Quincy that it had just come onto the schedule and I would talk to you about it. I can tell you, he was not pleased.”
Murphy shut his eyes briefly, then reached for another rib. He gnawed on that for a while.
Then he said, “I’ll call him. He’ll hate me, but I’ll call him. We can’t even think about shipping until late Monday, not with a long soak like that. We have to do that long-soak stuff on the weekend. If I move his order to the front of the queue, it’s going to make fifty or a hundred other orders late. And that’s all those other customers mad at us, instead of just one mad at us – who’s already mad at us.”
“Makes perfect sense,” said Jayro. “Great pork butt, by the way.”
Murphy nodded, appreciating the compliment, yet it did not lift his spirits.
“Hey, just to change the subject,” Jayro said, “what do you think of this new lady, this Amy, comin’ in as president?”
“As ‘interim’ president,” said Murphy, “which suggests to me they don’t want her to stay. But as for Amy herself, what I know of her I like. I think she’s a straight shooter. And I think she knows her end of it, the marketing and customer end, pretty good. On the other hand … she don’t know a dang thing about production. And she’s got this new ops guy from New York, this Wayne Reese, telling her what’s what – she won’t know how to judge what he tells her. And then she’s got the Geniuses in F&D, who are in their own world up there and out for themselves. I seriously doubt if Amy can handle them. B. Don Williams could barely keep them in check. But we shall see. We shall see.”
“What about the new ops guy?” Jayro asked.
Murphy was carefully placing beautiful shreds of pork barbeque on a bun and did not answer at first. In fact, he took so long that Jayro thought he was ignoring the question. Then Murphy said:
“We have suffered, Jayro. We have suffered through the across-the-board cuts, although I was able by hook and crook to protect Godzilla. We have suffered through pay-by-the-piece incentives, which I have now canceled. We have suffered the WING terminals that tell people exactly the wrong thing to do. We have suffered gridlock work-in-process inventory in the name of productivity. We have suffered Winner Chemicals, which makes us buy what we don’t need and can’t supply what we are out of. And we have long suffered the indifference of the Geniuses at F&D.”
“Right on, Murph, right on.”
“Now, finally, we see the rays of hope. The Tornado is gone.”
“Yes, praise the Lord.”
“And we are slowly clawing our way back. We can now walk the plant floor and not kill ourselves tripping over excess inventory. Godzilla has been re-established as the production constraint, and all production is keyed to Godzilla’s actual output. We have hired back some of those the Tornado forced us to cut, as well as a few new hires, to give us the speed we need for more throughput. Despite the cases like today of Garth Quincy and his unfortunate customer, we are actually meeting most shipping commitments better than we were.”
“I raise my cup of sweet tea in tribute,” said Jayro.
“So, yes, we still have our problems – cracks in the Navy job, orders that are late before they even get into production. But Oakton is getting better. We are returning to sanity and to a level of