Abandoned by the Planners!

Our materials management group downsized from 6 to 3 planners which they attributed to increased automation and AI. At the same time, they announced to our stability group that the service they’ve been providing to plan packaging runs for our annual commitment studies will be ending in two months. They will now require us to order our samples from regularly scheduled commercial batches and their only service will be to make weekly packaging schedules available to us. This means we need to dedicate a significant resource to track their schedule and our orders. It is also a significant shift in timing so we risk running studies well beyond expiry and worse yet risk missing commitments.

Our stability procedure specifically calls for Planning to schedule packaging runs, but unfortunately it was never in their procedures—these neanderthals are not a Quality Assurance organization, so they don’t place as high a premium on procedures anyway. In this case money talks and three headcount is seen as a lot of money. Where have we gone wrong to get to this point? How can I make upper management see the light to force the planners to comply with our procedure?

If this situation caught you off-guard, it sounds like you’ve not maintained a healthy relationship with one of your key stakeholders but have, in their minds, been abusing their kindness over the years. It’s probably too late to salvage this situation, so I’d suggest moving on to developing a process that works that hopefully can use what goodwill the planners have left. Better yet, you might be able to tap into the same AI that they’re using to help identify stability batches well in advance. It’s not good news, but good possibilities are ahead of you.