Conflict and Negotiation: Maintaining Long-Term Professional Relationships One o
ID: 470807 • Letter: C
Question
Conflict and Negotiation: Maintaining Long-Term Professional Relationships
One of the most important aspects of negotiating with someone or a business that you have a long-term and on-going relationship with is maintaining that relationship post-negotiation. Consider the following negotiation:
You are the project manager for a manufacturing company. You have a long-term relationship with a supplier that provides your company with computer chips for your product. There have never been any previous issues, and you and the supplier have had a great relationship. However, with the last shipment, there were defects in 25% of the chips. You need to discuss this issue with the supplier and determine the best solution. Your main concern is not ruining the relationship, but the defects are costly for your organization.
Based on this scenario above how would you approach the following if you were to prepare a letter to be sent to the supplier’s president.
1. Current issue
2. Your suggestion for solving this issue
3. The outcome you would like to see
4. Time frame
5. Suggest your alternatives and solutions
Please indicate the associated # with the answer. Thank you.
Explanation / Answer
1. The current issue is of a high defect rate of 25% in the last lot of chips provided by the supplier. This defect rate is extremely expensive for my organization.
2. My suggestion for solving the issue would be to incorporate preventive controls to ensure that defects like these are not passed on to my organization.
3. The outcome I would lkike to see is a Root Cause Analysis, Prevebntive Controls in place for ensuring no repetitions and manual checks till the point Preventive controls are in place.
4. The RCA and manual controls should be executed immediately. The plans for preventive controls should be ready by the time of the next delivery and the implementation should be done before the delivery of the 3rd order from my organization.
5. Besides preventive controls already suggested, an alternative could be manual inspections. This is less desirable, but is still acceptable in the short term if preventive controls are difficult. The last and least desirable alternative is to change the existing contract to involve penalties related to the defect rate to ensure higher quality of delivery.