I had only recently joined the organisation – a leading vendor of smartcards and security products. Our largest & fastest growing UK customer was showing hugely increased demand for SIM cards. My predecessor had not aligned production forecasts with real demand, and at my first meeting, I had to inform the customer that we were close to running out of SIMs. We were their sole supplier, and the chip used on the card was specific to this customer and on a long lead-time from the manufacturer. The situation was critical.

Re-build confidence in the relationship with the client by formulating and delivering a business recovery plan within a very limited time window.

– create contingency supply plan with manufacturing, logistics and finance

– communicate plan to C-level at the client

– timely delivery of this plan

– post-mortem to ensure that situation would not be repeated

Ahead of the customer meeting, I met with our local & overseas factory management teams to assess the scale of the issue & brainstorm options.

Some weeks earlier, during my company induction, I was able to follow the production of a batch of SIM cards through the factory. Using this experience, I determined that it might be possible to re-test silicon wafers that had been rejected during in-bound QC to find sufficient chips to build a quantity of SIMs to tide the customer over. We negotiated with factory management and ran extra QC and production shifts over a public holiday weekend.

We managed to produce a further six weeks supply of SIM cards, and ship these to the UK within three days.

We found a second-source supplier of microprocessors, improved forecasting processes and strengthened relationships right across the client organisation.

Shortly afterwards, the client signed a contract renewal which increased annual incomes by around 30%, furthermore, the client decided not to appoint a second SIM card supplier.