Business Lunch

On Tuesday, March 20, 2007 I attended to my very first business lunch. The topic of the day was “Time as an Indicator of Supplier Capability,” and the speaker was Paul D. Ericksen. The presentation was about the supply chain with emphasis on the suppliers. Paul D. Ericksen argued that time is the essence of the supply chain, and that minimizing the Manufacturing Critical-path Time (MCT) is the best way to reduce your costs. This means that the supplier has to use the “lean” approach in order to reduce the “waste” time. The longer an item is immobile, the more money is going to waste. The goal is to have constant movement on the products and minimize the storage. This is not as easy as you might imagine; collaboration between the supplier and the company is utterly important. In a perfect world, a company would receive an engine for example, right before the installation, and the supplier would ship it on arrival from the factory, while the factory assembles all the pieces in the engine with every part arriving right before the assembling. Although the world we live in is far from perfect, but we are working towards this goal.

As this was my first business lunch, or business anything for that matter, I was far more nervous than I should have been. I had a lot of time to think about the meeting and there is so much I would want to change. During the round were everybody presented themselves I actually managed to panic and do the worst possible presentation. I understand now that next time, I should do ANYTHING but what I did. What happened was probably worst case scenario for me, therefore next time I should try to relax more and be more confident.
Attending to this meeting has made me realize that I have so much more to learn, and now I have a clearer picture on what I need to work on. First of all I need to find out my strongest features and emphasis more on this during a business conversation. The part that needs the most work is that I need to learn how to let go of my mental blocks that stops me from talking. Bottom line is I have nothing to loose, so why approach this matter in a shy way? The only thing that could happen is that I go away, without anybody’s business card. Well, I have already done that so now it is time for a different approach. Next time there will be a different Daniel.