Yesterday morning, I had one of the more perplexing moments in front of my RSS reader.<\/p>\n
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Purchasing Magazine published a story in which they named Steven Schaffer, Boeing\u2019s Vice President of Global Partners, its Supply Chain Manager of the Year.<\/p>\n
That itself wasn\u2019t perplexing. But what was perplexing was the content of the story.<\/p>\n
It started off going into how a supply problem forced a significant delay of the the much-anticipated first flight of Boeing\u2019s new aircraft. Then, it quoted Shaffer\u2019s solution to the problem as \u201cWe trust our suppliers.\u201d<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t know about you, but I started to wonder if it was April Fools Day with the way the article started. Was this an underhanded rip on Boeing?<\/p>\n
It turned out to be serious.<\/p>\n
Now I am not doubting Schaffer\u2019s capabilities one bit. You don\u2019t get to his position in a company like Boeing without being one of the best, if not the best, at what you do.<\/p>\n
And I definitely won\u2019t pretend for one second that I could do a better job than Schaffer. He may just have the most challenging purchasing job in the world and, throughout my career, I certainly have made mistakes along the way.<\/p>\n
But isn\u2019t it a bit strange to provide an award to someone in the midst of an unresolved, high-profile performance problem?<\/p>\n
To be clear, I\u2019m not saying that the problem was even Schaffer\u2019s fault.<\/p>\n
But could it have been? Sure. Here are potential sources of the problem \u2013 total speculation:<\/p>\n
I would have liked to see Purchasing address whether these items could have contributed to the program delay. I also think that the timing would have been better if the award was given after a problem had been solved, rather than in the midst of it.<\/p>\n
What do you think?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yesterday morning, I had one of the more perplexing moments […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":4031,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-procurement"],"yoast_head":"\n