Shipping The Blame

(Our company has an integrated inventory-and-sales system which automatically processes all our orders. Normally everything is fully automated and runs smoothly, but occasionally…)

Sales Rep: “Why didn’t this order process last night?”

Me: “What does it say in Order Management?”

Sales Rep: “It just shows ‘not shipped’!”

Me: “Right, let me pull it up myself. What’s the order number?”

(“Not Shipped” is not one of the status settings our software uses. It turns out it’s now showing on ‘backorder’, and there is a long list of status updates in the comments.)

Me: “All right, let’s see here. This order was first entered yesterday morning at 10:12. It hit the hourly order process at 11, at which point it was put on hold for credit fraud alert. That wasn’t cleared until TODAY at 10:30 am.”

Sales Rep: “Well, we had a lot of issues getting it cleared.”

Me: “Seems to be. It then got put onto manager review for another three hours…”

Sales Rep: “We needed to update the ship-to address and it was never cleared. Nobody knew how to do it.”

Me: “Your manager didn’t know how to clear ‘hold for manager review’?”

Sales Rep: “No, when we forwarded it to him he took care of it. We thought it was done automatically.”

Me: “Ah. Well, after that it got put on hold AGAIN, at just past three.”

Sales Rep: “We needed to put in the customization details.”

Me: “Why weren’t those put in in the first place?”

Sales Rep: “We didn’t know we had to!”

Me: “When you enter it as a custom order, rather than from straight stock, the FIRST POP-UP says that you need to enter the custom info! How did you even get past that?!”

Sales Rep: “We just put all X’s in there! But we got that cleared!”

Me: “Right, you got that cleared at 5:10 pm. The last order process job runs at 5, because the delivery trucks show up between 5:30 and 6. And even if you had gotten this done fifteen minutes sooner, it STILL wouldn’t have shipped last night because it’s a custom order, meaning we needed to specially process it.”

Sales Rep: “Well, that’s absolutely ridiculous. YOU just lost us the sale! How could we have gotten this out in time!?”

Me: “I don’t know? Don’t handle every step of the process incorrectly and spend a day and a half fixing it, then try to blame the guy who literally only gets involved AFTER you do all that?”