“What gives?” I asked. (This is known as a probing diagnostic question.)

“We’re having difficulty ramping back up,” Rene replied. “It’s interesting that when we were doing four times the volume, things seemed easier. We had almost no back-orders. We never built excess inventory in our finished goods. I know we are running with fewer people, but we have brought back plenty of production people to cover the output.”

“How do you get both backorders and excess finished goods at the same time?” I wanted to know.

“Easy. One product line runs short, the next one runs long. And we’re not that busy. You would think this would be easy.”

“And, what does the supervisor say?”

“Well, we reorganized last year, to deal with the recession,” Rene explained. “So, we have a manager watching the area, actually three areas. And that’s where the problem seems to be. He tells me that he is constantly putting out fires. Like yesterday, we ran short on raw materials for one of the lines.”

“I thought you had an MRP system that was supposed to take care of those issues?” I pressed.

“We do. But we adjusted our min/max re-order points to deplete some of our inventory during the recession and the manager hasn’t had time to go back and re-adjust as our volume ramps up. Not to mention, lead times from our suppliers, the ones still left, are all over the place.”