So here’s the story with shooting planes….from our VP of manufacturing (I’ve edited out confidential information):
- We are behind on shooting plane production. We currently have 3x RH shooting planes past due and 1x LH shooting planes past due.
- We have shut down two of the three large mills traditionally used to make these planes this year due to parts availability and obsolescence.
- Shooting planes have been industrialized on the new FMS system and can now run on demand.
- There is a campaign now to catch up on shooting planes. There have been 2x RH shooting planes shipped in the last two months and we have x on hand prepping for export orders.
- Many of the RH shooting planes shipped in the last two months went to export customers who have orders older than the oldest LH shooting plane order on the books for LV. For example, the oldest LV LH shooting plane order in the Veritas system was due in March 2022; two of the RH shooting plane orders shipped during this run went to export orders that were due in March 2021.
- We have dedicated resources to produce shooting planes until we have fully caught up with open orders (3x RH and x LH).
- There are 1.5X LH bodies sitting behind grinding right now. We’ll take a break from the RH campaign and switch over at surface grinding to LH to fill backorders.
I would also note that, despite their similarity – tool sets and routing mean RH and LH planes are completely different products, though they do compete for the same grinding resources. The miniatures are again, completely different products – and have no impact on their full-size equivalents. In fact – we sequence our new product releases to avoid hitting bottlenecks with existing products. We have dozens of new products waiting to be released.
Where we have clearly failed is managing expectation. We have to be better at telegraphing delivery dates – but even that is inexact in such a complex environment, and when something like a machine failure occurs, is can be almost impossible to anticipate the downstream impact – and it can be pervasive.
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Originally Posted by Rob Lee
