She spent the night at her grandmother’s, but slept poorly. At breakfast, Geneviève raised the subject again, starting with something Héloïse had heard her say before. “You just tell me what you decide to do with the business. I’ll go along with whatever you want. What does Thomas say?”
“You know, Thomas and I decided at the beginning of our relationship that each of us would do whatever we thought best for ourselves, first and foremost. It’s really the only way we can stay happy together.”
“All the same, you might not be able to ‘make music’ together as often as you might like ...”
“That may be true, Mamy, but Thomas is away more frequently these days to tour with his chamber music ensemble. We always agreed that whichever of us became successful first would make as much out of it as possible. It won’t last forever, as you well know.”
“Yes, yes. I know what you are saying, and I also know what I am talking about,” responded Geneviève. “At least you’re not being taken in by all that fairytale business about ‘looking for your other half.’ Two people together are always two people and more, not merely two halves.”
After such a heavy weekend, Héloïse felt disturbed and unable to decide anything. She got into her car that Monday morning to set out for the factory without much thinking. She will see how she feels on-site.
When she gets there, she stares at the two spaces left empty by the absences of Thierry Ambi and Henri Rami. It doesn’t look like she’d be replacing any parking signs today.
The weather has changed over the past week. Clouds dull the sky, and the wind bends the trees over the parking lot. Héloïse struggles to open the door to the building, and it slams noisily behind her. All the offices are empty. She heads for reception where she nearly runs into Léon, who quickly moves away from Yasmina and tries his best to appear nonchalant. He stammers slightly in telling her that the others are upstairs in a meeting.
Héloïse climbs the spiral staircase and hesitantly opens the door to the conference room. The strained atmosphere plunges her back into the previous week.
Hubert is leaning on the table, which is covered with papers, and Georgette looks frozen. Roger stands stiff as a board, his mouth half-open as though he were watching TV news coverage of an armed conflict. The two opponents are again Jean-Marc Gridy and Hubert Lancien who are arguing sharply with each other.
“If you’d only give us accurate sales forecasts, we wouldn’t have all these problems!”
“But, my friend, if forecasts were accurate, you would call them orders!”
Always defensive of his metal shop, Jean-Marc carries on. “Anyway, we can’t just keep on working in a fog like this!”
Georgette manages to unfreeze herself and says in her caustic tone, “If you don’t make any kind of a sales forecast, you’re effectively forecasting no sales at all. And that’s always worse than an inaccurate forecast! Mr. Ambi always said that, and he would add: ‘Plan now or groan later.’”3
“I never said I didn’t want to make any forecast at all,” sighs Hubert. “But I can’t do anything more than express the forecasts in the customer’s own words for each of our product lines. The forecasts get updated at the monthly S&OP meeting. That’s not the point of this weekly master production schedule meeting—which by the way I am not even supposed to attend! It’s too late to adapt our resources, and too detailed. How am I supposed to tell you how many chairs we’re going to sell, and of which model? Do you think the customers themselves even know what they’re going to want in two months’ time? However, what I can certainly tell you is that since we lost our contract with Saint-Nazaire, our sales in the Catamer line are going to drop by 10 to 20 percent for at least the next year. Our only chance to compensate for this now is to pull out all the stops in developing the Collectivité line, by delivering strictly to the customer due dates. But, for pity’s sake, don’t ask me which model!”
“But if you don’t tell us which model, how will Léon know what components to supply?”
“It isn’t up to me to make those calculations. You need to go back through our order history and find the right mix of models there. Thierry said something about some solution and was supposed to do all that!”
Jean-Marc, whose chair faces the door, is the first to notice Héloïse. He gestures with a nod of his head to indicate her presence to the others, who all sit facing him. Héloïse enters and goes around the table, shaking hands. There is now a heavy silence, which she breaks suddenly.
“I believe I sat through a conversation similar to this one just last week. I will sit down with Hubert and we will go over the sales forecast together. But for next week, I don’t imagine that you’ll be able to manufacture more products than Léon has the material for, will you?”
This question, although asked somewhat hesitantly, makes a strong impression nonetheless. Georgette produces a sheet of paper from her notebook and chimes in, “All we need to do is follow Mr. Ambi’s notes on the ‘master production schedule’ process. It is written here that our goal is to make a realistic schedule of what products we want to manufacture once we have verified the availability of components and the balance between the load and the capacity at the bottleneck.”
Jean-Marc’s eyes pop out of his head. “What do you know about bottlenecks? You’ve never even set foot in the workshop!”
Georgette leafs through her notes with an air of indifference. “I know exactly what bottlenecks are. Roger showed me. It is where the sub-assemblies are stuck, just before the machine with the lowest capacity. That spot determines the rate of production for the whole shop floor.”
Roger swallows, nodding his head in agreement. Jean-Marc looks at him furiously and says, “Wherever the bottleneck is, I just don’t have enough people!”
Roger speaks up. “But I’ve got too many people in the wood shop. We ordered the locks for the desks for that college in Saumur too late. So we can’t deliver them. The wood shop is full of desks without locks. Our guys can’t even turn around down there!”
“I don’t see what that’s got to do with me!” Jean-Marc retorts.
“Look, I could send over some young guys. They’d surely be able to help you with something.”
“You’re not going to start talking about ‘multiskills’ again, are you?” Jean-Marc turns toward Héloïse as if to call her as witness. “This was all Thierry Ambi’s idea. ‘Multiskills’! ‘Multiskilled matrix’! As though woodworkers could do the same job as metalworkers. Locksmithing is a real profession. You can’t just change people’s work like that! Besides, your father didn’t approve.”
Hubert gets up, exasperated. “I’ll leave it to you all. I’m going to show the sales forecasts to Héloïse. Georgette, I’d like you to stay here and help them commit to a master production schedule for at least this week, after verifying what we have in stock. For the coming months, I’ll tell you what my forecasts look like per product line and you can use them as you want.”
The room is silent as Héloïse and Hubert leave, but it doesn’t last long. The din of voices can be heard again even before they reach the bottom of the stairs.
They sit down in Hubert’s office, and Héloïse says, “So. Would you please explain to me how you come up with these sales forecasts?”
Hubert pulls