Kandia Frangiadakis: Welcome, everyone, and thank you so much for joining us today. My name is Kandia Frangiadakis. I oversee our industrials practice here at Catalant. 

Defense spending is heading toward a trillion dollars. Contracts are signed, delivery schedules are on the board, and yet across the industrial base, supply chains are quietly falling behind. Today, we’re unpacking why and what separates the organizations that hold their commitments from ones running a crisis on a rolling 30 basis. Ash and Arvind, welcome. In a few words, I would love for you to introduce yourself and share where you see this problem from your angle and perspective? Arvind, you start us off.

Arvind Chawan: Hi Kandia, thanks for the opportunity to be here. I’ve been in the aerospace industry for the last 23 years, supporting recoveries and turnarounds. And what I’m seeing right now is that there are two main issues. One that’s being really driven by some of the customers, and then that’s translating also to some of the supplier issues, so it’s coming from both sides.

Ash Ateshkadi: Nice to see you again, Arvind, and thanks, everybody. You know how a defense company can have a contract signed, the funding approved, and the delivery schedule locked in, but still miss the date? Well, that’s the kind of problem I’ve been trying to solve for the last 25 years, from the factory floor all the way to the executive team. I’m Ash Ateshkadi, founder and principal at Triumph Advisory Group, and I focus on aerospace and defense supply chain performance when the system is under pressure.

Kandia Frangiadakis: Great, welcome both of you. Let’s jump right in with the first question. Every few years, someone declares a defense surge. What makes this one structurally different from the cycles that came before it? Arvind, maybe you want to kick things off.

Arvind Chawan: What’s different this time is really we have parallel growth across the aerospace, defense, and energy industries coming at the same time. And why that’s significant is that these industries pull on the same constrained suppliers — those that are providing or able to do special processes, those that are able to hold really tight tolerances, then those that are able to produce some of the forgings and castings that are necessary in this area. In the past, usually when one industry was down, the other one was growing, so there was some relief. That relief isn’t there right now. And a direct example I can give you is one customer I was working with, two different divisions, they were competing for the same supplier capacity. I was seeing it from the supplier side, when they had the orders, and both customers from the same company were fighting each other for that slot. And these were some of the precision components that are going into the hot gas path or the rotating section of the turbine. So that, I mean, happened before, but right now it’s a little bit more prevalent and causing more of an issue.

Ash Ateshkadi: That’s a great point, Arvind. I would say that also the funding profile is what really makes this one very different as well. National defense, as Kandia mentioned, crossed a trillion dollars this year, but much of that really came through reconciliation money that the Department committed to obligate inside a single fiscal year. So that is not a ramp; that is a wall of demand landing on a base that did not really scale ahead of it. And the constraint is no longer budget authorization, which is what we’ve seen in the past decades; it is a physical absorption. Can the supplier base, workforce, and capacity take what is really being asked of them? That’s the big difference.

Kandia Frangiadakis: And what is happening in the industrial base right now that’s not showing up in the headlines?

Arvind Chawan: I can start with that one. Ash, building off what you were talking about with the funding profile, and then also adding what I’d say is the quieter story. So, the headline story is, aerospace suppliers and defense suppliers are struggling. But what Ash, you had just mentioned about the funding profile — this is actually causing the capacity to be squeezed from both ends. When you talk about the government’s funding and spending, some of that funding is multi-billion dollars that’s going towards strengthening the organic industrial base within the Navy, within the Air Force, Army, or any of the branches. And those new customers, or those federal customers, they’re pulling on some of the same constrained capacities that these aerospace and defense primes and energy primes are going after as well. So that’s the little bit quieter story that the government’s entering this market. Second is the reason around why some of these suppliers are perceived to be failing, and that’s an assumption from customers about overstated capacity in their supply chain and planning against the overstated, or  even incorrect, capacity. And that’s a little bit quieter story than, hey, suppliers are just struggling.

Ash Ateshkadi: Yeah, Arvind, I think the structural picture is also very stark. We’ve seen castings and forgings tend to be some of the choke point almost everyone eventually hits. Titanium right now is running around 9 months. I remember one specific high-demand steel alloy from a single source is quoting 70 to 80 weeks. This is not a pandemic hangover. The GAO warned Congress that foundry closures could impair defense mobilization back in, what, 1981? 45 years later, we are running a bigger surge through a much smaller base. So, is the system recovering? Not really. It is holding, and holding is not a strategy for the demand spike that we’re seeing right now.

Kandia Frangiadakis: Ash, that’s a good point that I would love to dive into a little bit more. What are you actually hearing from clients? What are they struggling with from day-to-day?

Ash Ateshkadi: Yeah, what I hear from clients — I would characterize it as a quiet loss of confidence in their own schedules. The orders are real, right? The funding is real, which is great. But the commit dates do not feel real anymore. And a lot of that really comes from this thing I call a dual-use collision. As Arvind mentioned this, the same forging cell, heat treat line, inspector, or specialty material may be supporting a defense program and a commercial aerospace program at the exact same time. And when both these demands hit in the same week, there’s no magic spare line in the background that you could just mobilize. And this is where I think a lot of leaders I see in aerospace and defense, they start reaching for DPAS — the Defense Priorities and Allocations System — or priority ratings. These tools matter, but they mostly just reorder the queue. They do not create another furnace or another qualified operator or another source of a constrained material. The reality is not simply a part shortage; it is a confidence problem, and leaders are no longer sure which dates they can actually trust.

Kandia Frangiadakis: Arvind, what are your thoughts?

Arvind Chawan: Building on that, I want to share from two perspectives, one’s from the customer, one’s from the supplier. Let’s start with the customer side of it. What I’m seeing or experiencing at the customer side is that their team or their buyers aren’t really buying anymore; they’re acting as expediters. And that doesn’t just happen at the buyer level. That happens at the manager, director, senior director, and sometimes even vice president or corporate officer level, where everyone turns into an expediter in some of these areas. And it’s causing multiple hot lists, trying to figure out, okay, what’s the priority for today, who’s shouting the loudest that I need to respond to, and then that signal or noise is being passed on from the customer into their supplier. When I’ve been on the supplier side, they see that noise coming in, they thought they had a good plan and run for the week, and all of a sudden they have to do a breakdown, do another setup or a changeover, and they’re losing capacity because of that. And that capacity loss isn’t being assumed or taken into consideration by the customer side. So, everyone’s trying to do the right thing for that overall product, to make sure product ships, but they’re fighting each other, or they’re not collaborating in their solution, and they’re more transmitting some of that noise.

Kandia Frangiadakis: When you walk into an organization that’s actually holding its commitments, what are they doing that everyone else may not be? Ash, maybe you start us off.

Ash Ateshkadi: Most of my clients that I see in aerospace and defense are telling me they run a cadence and speak to suppliers with one coherent voice. Honestly, Arvind and I have seen, most of the time, that almost nobody does that. The failure modes are relatively specific, and I would put them in a few buckets. One, I would say, is counterfeit cadence. A meeting where status gets reported but nothing closes. The test is not whether the meeting actually happens; it’s whether any action on the list is older than a couple of weeks old. Another issue that I see is counterfeit single voice. I mapped decision rights at a major aerospace and defense enterprise recently, and on the row that said “manage suppliers,” there were four separate functions rated as responsible. Procurement, supplier recovery, readiness, and the business itself were all calling the same supplier, and each believed it was the voice. The other one is a counterfeit fact base. A capacity number in the system that really nobody has walked the floor to really confirm. So, to your question, Kandia, the companies that actually are performing well, what they’re doing right is they’re holding commitments and they’ve closed on those three gaps that I mentioned. They actually look kind of boring, and that’s exactly what the point is. They also put practitioners at the supplier interface, so people can walk a floor and know exactly whether the answer the supplier is providing them is real or not. So good looks boring. Arvind, I don’t know what you’ve seen, but I’m interested in your thoughts too.

Arvind Chawan: It’s some of what you’ve seen, maybe just not at the same level. What I’ve seen and experienced of customers or suppliers that are able to hold their commitments is a few things. One, there’s transparent and honest communication throughout the different organization levels. Nobody’s really afraid to, let’s say, share bad news; they’re just sharing facts and figures and being honest, so everyone kind of has a true sense of reality. Second, they have a real understanding of their constraints and capacities. They’re not being overly optimistic or ambitious on their assumptions. They’re being more realistic and then actually planning towards those realistic facts, as you said, instead of the counterfeit facts. Lastly, in the organization on the customer side, they actually have a strong person in the buyer role, meaning there’s that person who is that practitioner, as you described it, that knows what questions to ask, where to dig, and then can translate that back and understand what’s realistic versus what’s being overly optimistic. And too often, I’ve seen in that interface role that there are early-career individuals. It’s not their fault, they just haven’t had the experience, but they’re being asked to manage a recovery or manage a manufacturer without any manufacturing experience, so that leads into some of the organizational challenges as well.

Kandia Frangiadakis: You draw a distinction most leadership teams miss: a supplier recovery problem versus a supply control problem. What is the difference and why does it matter so much? Ash, you start us off.

Ash Ateshkadi: This is very near and dear to my heart, and it’s a distinction I care about the most because I think getting this wrong really burns the one thing this current environment doesn’t give back: time. Kandia, you mentioned recovery. A supplier recovery problem is relatively narrow. A supplier is late against their plan, but it’s still a feasible plan. So you build a recovery plan and pull them back to the date. A supply control problem is very different. It’s usually your own system has lost control of the signal. And the test is you can go and ask who owns the commit date on your most critical part. If two people answer, or nobody does, you have a control problem. I ran this diagnostic at a major aerospace and defense company, and with close to 40 leadership interviews we conducted, what we told the executive team was one line: this is not only a supplier recovery problem. Which is the way they had framed it. It was actually a supply control problem. And the reason why we said that was because plans were set above real capacity, escalations as a result recurred week after week, and the company was 2 to 2.5 years behind the trajectory of its own growth plan that was required. So, if that is your problem, more pressure is not going to fix it. You’ve got to restore the control first: one voice, verified dates, closed-loop cadence, and then recovery has a chance. And most teams that Arvind and I have seen do it in the opposite order. I don’t know, Arvind, if you want to chime in on that.

Arvind Chawan: Yeah, I can connect the examples you’ve seen, Ash, to one of my more recent projects. It was a forging and machining supplier, and they were running around 37% equipment effectiveness. For the non-manufacturing individuals, that means two-thirds of the capacity is already gone just when you’re running that low. And when I was in the shop and doing the diagnostic and making the recovery, we found that none of their issues were really from the quality side; it was more on the availability side. Within 12 weeks, we were able to get that number from 37 to 51% by doing some tactical things in their operation — SMED workshops, optimized planning and scheduling through better product families definition, improved visual management, operator training, and so forth — the basic quick improvement ones. We were able to get a third more capacity in 12 weeks. That sounds like a great recovery story: there’s a supplier problem, they weren’t really performing or not being very efficient, and we were able to go in there and improve some of the metrics. But adding to what Ash said, when we’re talking about the signal or that noise coming, it was truly a control problem. The losses were being driven by the noise coming or the changing signals coming from the customer, which was causing the increased changeovers, setups, replanning the entire shops, orders jumping queues, and then a lot of material being stranded on the shop floor and aging. And that’s really the distinction. The recovery is, all right, you do some of these quick improvements, but the control side of it is that signal or that noise that’s coming in that needs to be dampened. So recovery is just making the supplier better; control is really making that signal better.

Ash Ateshkadi: Well said.

Kandia Frangiadakis: When you think about agility and discipline, those get framed as opposites sometimes. How do best operators hold both at once without completely descending into chaos? Arvind, maybe you want to start us off there.

Arvind Chawan: I don’t think they’re necessarily opposites. It’s more that discipline can get you the agility. Continuing with that shop example, when we were able to make that improvement within several weeks, it wasn’t because the customer or the supplier was being too agile and too responsive that we were able to get the gains. We were able to get the gains because we created more discipline in the system. We defined what some of the product families had to be so the planners better knew how to plan and what jobs to run through the shop. We standardized and improved how the changeovers were happening so that more time was spent on actually machining or forging the part versus trying to do a setup. And those standardizations or improvements that discipline helped gain was roughly a 70% reduction in changeover time, and that shift or that increase in available time allowed some absorption of the schedule changes and enabled some of that agility. So, I don’t really see them as being different, it’s more that discipline buys you the agility. Ash, what’s your take on this?

Ash Ateshkadi: Yeah, you and I, I think, both saw that. I would agree with you that we both saw that. The question is also where the discipline lives. If the discipline lives in a side war room, cut off from the system of record, the shop floor knows the truth. They’re feeling the pain every day, but the program plan does not. So, for companies that do this well, that discipline needs to be wired into the operating system. Supplier reality flows into the sales and operations planning, the master schedule, and the commitments that leadership is actually making externally. All this needs to be connected very well, so that I agree with you, the discipline is not just another meeting that we do; it is how the business needs to run, it’s the pulse of the business.

Kandia Frangiadakis: And most leadership teams believe they have visibility. But from your perspective, Arvind, what does real visibility look like, and how do you know when you actually have it?

Arvind Chawan: You know, it’s a good point. Everyone uses the term visibility and thinks having a dashboard with red and green traffic lights is visibility. It’s just, okay, that’s a part of it, but the information that goes on there is obviously more critical, and the teams that truly have visibility and can be more proactive, they’re looking at some of the leading metrics versus lagging or the result type metrics. They’re looking more than just a couple days or a week ahead, but their teams are starting to do more of what I describe as horizon management. You have some people truly focusing on the near term, let’s say in next days, next weeks, and more of that expediting type activity. Then you have another group of people that are focusing on the next horizon, and based on the commodity or what they need to do, but that look ahead and having the leading metrics to know, hey, are we looking far enough down, what are we seeing as potential issues so that the teams actually have time to react before the issue is felt or realized on the customer’s factory floor, that’s a little bit more of the true visibility versus saying, hey, I have this dashboard with red and green, but my line is still down, that indicates we just have the visualization, but we don’t have the right information showing on it. So the best companies or the ones that are being successful right now have that balance of near-term, mid-, and long-term. Their teams are organized to look at each one of those, and then they’re also making sure, or tying in what Ash just said a moment ago on that operating discipline, they’re actually ensuring they’re looking at these different horizons.

Ash Ateshkadi: Exactly. I think I would add that you can pretty much determine when a client is — whether they’re doing it right or not — the fastest way to tell is to look at what they measure, and more importantly, what the measurements actually make people do. Just measuring it and having a visibility chart like you said, red, yellow, green, is not enough. It’s what behaviors that is driving. On that same engagement that I was describing earlier, we built a data truth table, and every domain sorted four different ways: what is known, what is believed, what is disputed, and what is just flat out missing. So, capacity truth came back reliable for about maybe only about a third of the supply base. Two-thirds of the numbers driving the master schedule were just believed, and or they were not known. And that drives a huge problem, because you’re not dealing with the fact base. And the metrics were actually hiding it. On the aggregate level, on-time-to-request looked relatively healthy, while the supply position was deteriorated because buyers were moving purchase order dates to protect the numbers. And I would rather see the gap between commit date and the real need date, and how often does that date move, and how long actions actually sit open. This is an area, we haven’t really talked about this, but this is an area where I feel like AI could be fairly powerful with a caveat. AI can actually provide a really good opportunity, but only after the fact base is actually trustworthy. So a lot of people are jumping on the AI ship, and they’re trying to see how I can bring this on, and it’s powerful. It’s powerful for spotting weak signals across thousands of sub-tier data points across your supply base that no team can really manage this day-to-day manually. But if the data is unverified, AI just basically helps you make the wrong decision faster. So I would caveat, because I do hear a lot of our clients say how we can bring AI and when to bring it and how to bring it, I’d say you’ve got to fix that data first.

Kandia Frangiadakis: And we talk about capacity in terms of machines and parts, how about human capacity? How does a leader know if they have the right team to execute in a surge? Ash, maybe you want to start off.

Ash Ateshkadi: Yeah, I’ve been in aerospace and defense for 30 years, and when I started, everybody would say, well, it’s an aging workforce, we’re going to run into a huge issue, and it continues to be a problem. Human capacity is what leaders check last, unfortunately, but in my opinion, it actually matters the most. But I do need to be precise here, because I’m not just talking about headcount. At that same company that I was referring to, the finding was very blunt for us. The organization didn’t actually lack people, it actually lacked role clarity and depth. To Arvind’s point about experience base, adding buyers into that, for example, does not reduce the chaos, the chaos just eats them up, just absorbs them. So what you need is, from a human capacity standpoint, people who can make one judgment: is this a recoverable capacity gap with a supplier or the early signal of a supplier maybe quietly failing. Those look identical on a dashboard, but the response is very different; it’s opposite. The tells are not in the delivery data either. A recoverable supplier misses dates but tells you the truth about why, and the misses cluster on one operation, fairly simple. A failing supplier goes relatively quiet, the story changes between calls depending on who calls, who’s making the most noise on the customer side, the commit dates start to move in small increments instead of one honest reset. So, get that wrong, and you spend 6 months recovering a supplier you should have been exiting, possibly. And people who can make that call, it takes years to build, it’s a skill set. You can’t just pick this up, you can’t hire your way out of that inside of a surge window that we’re dealing with. I know Arvind doesn’t like the word surge, but calling it whatever we want in this window. Arvind, what are your thoughts on this?

Arvind Chawan: So, I agree and have seen the same things, that the human capacity’s misjudged often, and it’s like, is the headcount full or do we have all the roles filled, that’s usually the easy one, but not going to that second level of understanding what’s the capability or the skill of the individuals that are filling those roles. And back to that shop example, when we looked at the operators across the shifts, and went a little bit deeper beyond the number of people, we saw that, oh, we don’t have a person who’s at the same experience level on the off shifts or the second and third shifts, so if they were not as comfortable, capacity just naturally was was lower and output was lower than anticipated. On the office side or non-factory side, and this is sometimes a little bit more uncomfortable when you’re asking about capability of individuals. It’s not having the individual in that buyer or that interface role that have that manufacturing experience, so they don’t know necessarily what to ask or if they’re being fed truthful information or how to dissect it, and what to feed up or where to go after. So when we think about whether a team or whether a leader has the right team in place, I’d say we can look at it from two perspectives. One, if I’m the customer, and thinking about my own internal factory, I’d ask my team, how many people can run my constrained operations or operational steps? And that will give you an idea of, okay, where do you sit internally before you start blaming suppliers or somewhere outside. At the supplier interface side, ask the person who’s in the role whether or can they answer your question to the level of detail, they know what it takes to get the part from the supplier to the dock and being received, do they truly know the process? And if there’s not a confident answer on either of those, that’s given you an indication that, hey, that’s a risk that’s either not recognized and consequently can’t be managed, so that’s going to show up and cause issues for the company.

Kandia Frangiadakis: And as we think about heading in the right direction, for a leader who suspects a problem, but is not sure how deep it goes, what should they be asking inside their own organization this week?

Ash Ateshkadi: Arvind, why don’t you take that one first? I’ll chime in.

Arvind Chawan: Yeah, building off the last question about how do we know whether we have the right team in place, or whether a leader has the right team in place, I’d ask three main questions. One, for the critical suppliers, I would want to know how much of the capacity do we actually own? Are we assuming that we own capacity versus who are we sharing the capacity with? The procurement team needs to have an understanding of that. Second, when we’re thinking about the planning numbers, I would ask, when and how did we last validate the capacity? Is it real, or are we planning against a number that’s causing us some issues, or we’re causing some of our own issues? And then lastly, which is, I think, a little bit more insightful, is asking the procurement team, how many expedites or schedule changes did we send to the supplier? And when I say supplier, I mean some of the critical suppliers that are in the constrained commodities that we’d talked about at the beginning. And the next-level or follow question with that would be, how much unplanned how many unplanned setups did we cause by sending those schedule changes, and how much of our capacity do we just take away by sending the supplier the incorrect information or constantly changing information on them? If those questions can be quickly asked, and if you don’t get a quick answer, that indicates part of the diagnosis of where the problems might be if you can’t get those answers fairly quickly from your direct reports or the people you’re trusting to manage the supply base.

Ash Ateshkadi: I had a leader who actually asked me, what is the question I should be asking my folks? Which I thought was pretty proactive. And I would add just one question for the leadership team. I would say to the team, if demand rises again next quarter, which is exactly what we’re seeing in the defense side right now, where does the first bottleneck actually appear? And then stay silent, wait for that response, because we get different answers. Sometimes it’s a tier-1, sometimes it’s a tier-2, it’s a sub-tier process, and sometimes it’s the raw material itself. What I’m looking for is making sure when I get the answer that they’re pointing to a specific node of where that bottleneck is. If they cannot answer that with verified data, they’re really not managing the supply chain yet. I think they’re managing the symptoms more than anything else.

Arvind Chawan: And Ash just highlighting what you just said, that no clean answer, the uncertainty, or that pause you described, that doesn’t mean a knowledge gap within the team, to me that’s a diagnosis.

Ash Ateshkadi: Yeah.

Kandia Frangiadakis: And Ash, what about their suppliers? What should they be asking of them?

Ash Ateshkadi: I would say, I think the biggest shift is this: stop collecting commit dates, instead, start validating the reality underneath them. A commit date by itself is an opinion. What you really need is a constraint operation, real labor availability, actual yield, scrap, and the supplier’s own material position, maybe not just at their level, but also two tiers down. We’re talking about supply chain, so you’ve got to be aware of what’s happening in that chain of suppliers. Then you sort out what you find from that assessment. I would divide it into a couple of buckets. One is there are things you’re going to run into that are going to be operational blockers, and then there’re going to be some commercial blockers. They need different owners and different fixes, and most organizations run them both through the same channel, and I see a lot of things get messed up because of that. And I would say, also be careful with the default answer of — most people start to think when they see a problem, let’s dual source it. You know, in Arvind and I’s experience, on a flight-critical casting or forging, you’re talking 18 to 24 months out. So you’ve got to look at near-term levers, and near-term lever is really a more qualified output from the incumbent through accurate yield, throughput, and debottlenecking, while you can still do the second source qualification in parallel, but the near-term lever is really looking for more qualified output. Arvind, what are your thoughts on that?

Arvind Chawan: No, I don’t really have to add a little bit to what you mentioned, Ash, I 100% agree that getting the real equipment effectiveness number from not just the work center, but the overall line, so there’s a true capacity understanding, it’s critical. That’s one of the main questions we get from the supplier. What I’d add to that is understanding if there’s a true partnership with the supplier, understanding who’s ahead of them when they have to make a choice, like to try to understand some of the competitive landscape and where do you rank within their priority. And last one is I would ask them, what do we as a customer do to you that’s costing you capacity? And what I’ve noticed before is the customers that are creating more of the noise or more of the issues, they naturally get bumped down sometimes in the priority list, if you have so many hours in the week left to run, yeah, you may not get that slot if you’re causing a lot of their headache. But if you ask those questions to your suppliers, it gives you an honest picture of yourself, and one of the most important things is understanding what are you doing as the customer organization to your supplier that’s causing the issues that you should be able to quickly fix, when you’re talking about the near-term levers, or described like the near-term levers, Ash.

Ash Ateshkadi: Yeah, great point.

Kandia Frangiadakis: So, last question, for the operations team that is still firefighting, no verified visibility, no structure, what can they do to quickly get control? Ash, maybe you want to start with your thoughts.

Ash Ateshkadi: I smirked when you said that, cause they are firefighting. Most of my clients right now are in fire-fight mode right now. I would say that you do not want to start with a 6-month data project. We don’t have time for that. The next decommit wave will arrive before the analysis is going to be finished in 6 months. So I would recommend starting narrower. Focus, maybe a couple of weeks, 3 weeks, take your top, I don’t know, 20 or 30 suppliers on your pacing parts, and build one simple fact pack that really separates what you know from what you are assuming. When I did that at the client that I mentioned, the eye-opener for us, including myself, was not any single supplier, it was exactly how much of the schedule turned out to be just purely based on assumption, and it was really dressed up like a costume as a commitment. Then I would also say you want to also rank these things by real risk, and then act on that, like a directionally right view that drives action now beats a perfect model 6 months down the line, when the program has already slipped. So the goal is to simply just regain control of the relationships that really determine whether you’re going to be holding to your commitments in the quarter.

Arvind Chawan: Yeah, from my perspective, I think there’s three main things that a team could do. One is to take an honest inventory of your team, meaning like your direct reports, and understanding where are they spending their capacity each day? Are they leading, or are they really reacting? Are they working at their level, or are they working 2, 3, 4 levels down in the organization? What I’ve seen in my last three or four engagements is that everyone’s acting as an expediter, not just the buyer, sometimes at the senior director, sometimes even at the VP or C-suite level, they’re acting as expediters. Also, a subset to that question is understanding how is the team spending their capacity during the week, look at the calendars of not only yourself, but your team. How many of the meetings that are on there turn into expedite meetings, or are expedite meetings, versus strategic meetings to actually run the business, or proactively run the business? Second thing I would do is start managing in horizons. Everyone can’t just be an expediter, unfortunately that’s the case right now, and that’s what’s causing this firefighting that, Ash, you and I have described throughout this discussion. Start splitting up the teams to start working in horizons, so there’s somebody that is looking at the near-term, the days, the week, but also the there has to be people looking at months out, so that there’s enough time to not only identify a problem, but actually react and put a mitigation in place. And then third, as a leader, reinforce the behaviors that you expect from each org level, and don’t let every single meeting turn into an expedite meeting, or get down into the weeds. Make sure you’re operating at the level where you’re actually setting the example, or setting the behaviors to get control of the organization, and be more proactive and not constantly being reactive. So those would be the three main things I would do to get out of that firefighting mode.

Kandia Frangiadakis: Really helpful, and this has been such a valuable conversation, so thank you Ash and Arvind. I really appreciate the time. Before we sign off here, is there one or two main messages that you would want to make sure our listeners take away from this one? What would you want them to remember? Arvind, maybe you kick us off.

Arvind Chawan: Yeah, I think I’ve reiterated it a few times though, so I’ll just close on it as well. I’d say, don’t just focus on the near-term or immediate-term, make sure you’re looking at different horizons, and know how to manage each one of those, and have a plan to manage each one of those. This allows the teams to have breathing room so you can do some of these more operational improvement or strategic-type activities. And second is be very open and transparent, and accept the true situation, ensure the team feels comfortable giving news that’s fact-based, not just something that’s dressed up to look good when it’s really not. The reality is companies in this sector are facing similar challenges, so accept that reality, and then you can start figuring out a path forward. Ash?

Ash Ateshkadi: Yeah, I would close on a couple of points on the heels of that. I think you also have to know, first and foremost, what problems you have. A supplier recovery problem is a supplier late against a plan that still can work. A supply control problem is your own system no longer producing dates anyone believes, and Arvind hit on this, that you become a lower priority for suppliers. Now they’ve got a flood of orders, if you’re creating headaches for them and they don’t believe your dates and your schedule, you’re not going to get the highest priority. A lot of my clients, they think pushing harder helps. Pushing harder on a control problem just gets you more meetings, but the same slip date. So you want to restore control first, then recovery will work. And the last point I’ll close on is that you don’t need to wait for perfect data. Start with those 20 or 30 suppliers as I mentioned on your pacing parts especially, separate what you know from what you are assuming, and then act on any gap you see. I’ve seen my clients learn more in 3 weeks than in 6 months of deep, deep data analysis at this point. So that’s how I would close it, Kandia.

Kandia Frangiadakis: Thank you both, I appreciate this conversation. I hope that it’s given our audience something tangible and a way to diagnose where they really are and how to take action. If what we talked about today sounds familiar, the good news is, you don’t have to find a path forward on your own. We can help bring in deep expertise quickly, with the flexibility to scale up or down as needs change. Catalant has fundamentally a different model from legacy consulting, and for that kind of urgent, execution-focused work Ash and Arvind described today, that difference really matters. If you’d like to learn more and explore what this looks like for your organization, please don’t hesitate to reach out to any of your Catalant contacts, or get in touch at catalant.com. Thank you again, Ash and Arvind, for such a practical and honest conversation, and thanks to all of you for joining us today.