Excellent story about winder supplier “J”. When we did the rebuild of Franklin’s #1PM (c1s board), we really wanted a “J” winder. Believe it or not, their offering was only slightly more expensive than “V”, the second choice. During the finalization of T&C’s, the issue of receipt of drawings and manuals and such that we would need to develop training materials came up. As you found, “J” would not provide this information until the winder shipped. I can, to some degree, understand that they wanted to provide only ‘as built’ information. Anyway, Gene Correll threatened to cancel the order if we couldn’t get manual prep and foundation drawings according our proposed schedule. At that point, “J’s” lead negotiator closed his brief case, said he was sorry that we were taking that position and got up to leave! Correll almost had a stroke—he really wanted “J’s” winder. To make a long story short, after a lot of talking, “J” agreed to send drawings and manuals and such that they had recently shipped for a unit almost exactly like ours was to be. They blacked-out all info that referenced the other customer. We used those to prepare our training program; construction even moved forward on foundation drawings—all of us expecting to have to do some last-minute changes to our work.
Well, when our info came, it was nearly exactly the same as “J” had sent the other customer—foundation drawings were 99+% the same. The differences in the manuals were all related to features that we had identified as different on the two units.
So there is another example of “J” almost losing an order when a ‘work-around’ was very available.
By the way, then you have suppliers on the other end of the spectrum; “K” who would promise anything during the purchase phase and then deliver what they had intended from the outset. The good thing about “K” from my experience was that back then they would stay with you until you were more or less satisfied.
Have a nice day---birthday too.
Edward A. Turner
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