Your IT Bill Suggets Everything’s Fine…So Why Did a Customer Just Threaten to Walk?

Well, the start to your work day could have been better…

A customer’s called in and they’re raging because their order shipped late – and there’s a penalty clause attached.

Their call is the first time you’ve been aware of there being a problem at all. Now you’re managing a relationship that took years to build and quietly wondering how many other orders have been affected without you knowing…

You ask your Ops Manager what happened. She tells you it’s the systems again – the ERP doesn’t match the shop floor, hasn’t for a while, and everyone’s been “working around it”.

Nobody mentioned the workarounds to you -escalation never quite reaching “Tell the M.D Level”.

From the staff’s perspective it was just another Tuesday on the floor.

Here’s The Uncomfortable Bit.

You’re paying for IT support every month, you’re having your quarterly catch ups with your Account Manager. So, when something like this happens, the instinct is to ask “What are we paying for, exactly?” Fair question – but it’s probably directed towards the wrong problem.

The real issue is usually this: the person closest to the floor (your Ops Manager, your Production Lead… whoever’s fielding the daily fallout) sees the pattern clearly. They know which shifts run worse, which orders are most at risk, which fault keeps recurring. What they don’t have is the authority, or the framing, to turn that into a business case you’d pay attention to.

So, the issues never reach you until they’re approaching crisis level. A late delivery. A penalty clause. A customer questioning whether they can rely on you for the next contract.

By the time you hear about it, it’s not a planning conversation anymore. It’s damage control.

What You’re Not Seeing and Why That’s the Real Risk.

Manufacturers like yours that have grown steadily over a few years, picked up bigger contracts, added headcount, are often running on systems that were right for the business as it WAS, not the one it is NOW, gaps appear, workarounds become the norm. Nobody made a bad call. It just became “business as usual”, because nobody owns that conversation.

Your Ops Manager can’t authorise the spend. You don’t see the daily friction that would tell you it’s needed…

That gap is where business risk lives. Not in any one late order, but in the fact that nobody currently holds the whole picture – the operational reality AND the commercial exposure-at the same time.

A Different Way to Look at It.

You could keep fire-fighting, sporadically throwing incremental funds and resource at the flames when they appear….or acknowledge the pattern your team already knows about, and translate that into what it’s costing you – in lost production hours, in OTIF performance, in customer trust – so you can make a proper call on it.

Not after the next angry phone call… Before it’s even warranted.

If you’re not sure how well systems would hold up under the next big order, or whether you’d know about a problem before your customer does, that’s usually worth paying closer attention to.

One Last Thought…

The person who’s likely to notice this first probably already has. If you haven’t asked your Ops Manager what they’re dealing with day to day, this article could help kick that off.

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Computer Care gives manufacturing leadership the full picture on their technology – not just an invoice, but a clear view of where the operational risk sits, and what to do about it. Get in touch