Folks,

My colleagues at EastBridge Engineering (www.EB-INTL.com) have become very accomplished at saying “NO” during the past few years.

You say that in a service oriented business, we should be skilled at saying “YES.” Well, in some cases you’re right. We love to answer in the affirmative when we’re in the position to help a client get their product built properly, inspected and shipped on time. However if asked to do something that’s not feasible or downright stupid, we’re not afraid to respond with a hearty “NO!”

What prompts a no in the manufacturing services world:

• Please generate quotations based on our pencil sketch… NO!
• Get quotes from only one supplier… NO!
• The tolerance on that dimension is “do your best…” NO!
• Tell the manufacturer to buy the components from our US distributor… NO!
• Tooling should be free… NO!
• We don’t pay for NRE… NO!
• Just guesstimate the shipping costs… NO!
• Pull the tooling from our old supplier and launch the new one today… NO!
• We need it good, fast and cheap… NO!
• We need another 2500 units. Convince the vendor to ship them Friday… NO!
• Don’t bother inspecting the first run. Just ship it out… NO!
• We’ll pay you after we sell a box car load… NO!!!

We feel that we’re helping our clients when we say no in these cases. Over time, they usually agree. In my next posting, I’ll share how to interpret when a “Yes!” in Asia really means “No…” or “That will be really difficult…”

Cheers,
Jack Daniels
+1.617.401.7373
jack.daniels@eb-intl.com