It’s June 6th. 24 days until the end of the quarter. Everyone in most public companies (and many private as well) know what that means… time to take a hard look at where the sales and production numbers are falling. And many managers will take the traditional measures to pull the numbers forward from the next quarter.
Reducing production in the next quarter, increasing overtime costs in this quarter, increasing the general stress on the organization, perhaps building inventory or shipping early to customers, killing any level loading of equipment, creating stress-induced errors, putting off effective resolution of those problems, increasing shipping costs… well, you get the picture. I won’t even get into the ethical side of effectively deceiving shareholders or owners into thinking that this was a better quarter than it really was.
Focused Performance has a good article on this periodic madness, and it’s impact on the lean organization. Something to think about before driving your organization to ship incredible amounts over the next couple weeks, just to be sitting idle on July 1st.