Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/406201
NOVEMBER 2014 16 THE JOURNAL BY GEORGE PORTER SERVICE & SET-UP The Right Hand Must Know What The Left Is Doing In the ideal world we plan our work then we carefully carry out those plans and we have no problems. Perhaps you have noticed that it is not an ideal world. In fact it is very doubtful that we will ever experience such utopia in this life. Be that as it may we all do the best we can with what we have and learn to live with the results. When we make our own mistakes we can plan to change something so that next time we will not have to go through the same trou- bles again. What about when we "inherit" prob- lems that we must deal with but have no control over preventing them? Will we have to live deal- ing with the mistakes of others and never be able to prevent their occur- rence? In the manufactured housing installation busi- ness this is a way of life. Any problems occurring in the factory and not de- tected and corrected be- fore shipment will probably have to be taken care of by the set-up crew. The factory will re- imburse him for his labors but waiting for dry- wall patching to dry does not produce the same income for the installer as setting up the home. In that respect installers are in a sense losing money every time they have to patch a bunch of cracks due to shipping or some other reason to- tally out of their control. For the foreseeable fu- ture installers will have to do this work because there is no one else to take care of it but must it always be this way? There is no such thing as a facilitator or sys- tems analyst to diagnose the entire process. In fact there are extremely few people who are flu- ent in all the steps and could act in this capac- ity. Not only that who would they work for? Is the dealer going to pay someone to help the fac- tory correct the problems they unknowingly cre- ate? Are the installers going to make regular reports and/or visits to the factory to improve the overall functioning of the system? I think not. Don't say to your- self that this is happening already because you complain loud and long about things to everyone and not much changes. Complaining is only a symptom of a problem, it is a long way from auto- matically providing a so- lution. To solve the problem you must first know it exists, (the complaint) then you must be familiar with the entire system (manufac- turing thru set-up )to determine where and how to fix it. The trou- ble lies in the fact that no one knows it all as a complete system. We have experts in the industry for the various steps in- volved but in the last 45 years in this business I have never met anyone who knows all about design, production, marketing, sales, financ- ing, installation, repair, communities, trans- porting, foundations, the HUD Code, and all the state regulations concerning this industry. What we have now is not a coordinated ef- fort as a team to provide a product to con- sumers, it is mostly a collection of parts and that has to change if we are going to increase market share. Please consider the following example and see if you can solve the problem. I recently ex- perienced this during an installation seminar and was lucky enough to have the chief engi- neer and the production manager from the fac- tory there. The trucking company, dealer, and installation crew were present as well. It is very unlikely that this group will ever be in the same location at one time again so it offered a unique opportunity to discuss and solve a problem. The problem was that when the set-up folks arrived at the home it already had many drywall cracks around the doors and interior walls. They did not feel that they should have to fix them if they were not responsible for them being there. The factory said that they would pay them to repair the cracks if it was a production problem. These were not that bad but they would probably get much worse from shipping. The trucking company said it was impossible for anyone to move a home without cracking be- cause the frame flexes. The factory said the trucker was probably going too fast and that made the frame flex too much and the trucker said that if the home had a decent frame under it would not flex so badly and so on. The in- staller then jumps in with the fact that if all this happened before he got there how come he has to do all the fixing? This finger pointing is prob- ably why all these people avoid getting together in the first place. What we did was call for order and self-re- straint (not easy) and proceeded to solve the problem. Why did the drywall crack? Was the frame weak? The chief engineer said absolutely not! The home was \ 18 When we make our own mistakes we can plan to change some- thing so that next time we will not have to go through the same trou- bles again. What about when we "inherit" prob- lems that we must deal with but have no control over preventing them?