Читать книгу The Missing Links - Caroline Mondon - Страница 14
ОглавлениеA THREAT OF BANKRUPTCY AT H. RAMI
TUESDAY. 8:00 A.M. Héloïse pulls into the parking lot. She hesitates, and then decides to park again in the spot reserved for her father. She notices Thierry Ambi’s spot is still empty. Feeling her stomach knot up, she picks up her bag and enters the building.
Georgette’s head appears immediately at the door of her office.
“Still no news?” asks Héloïse.
“Still no news,” answers Georgette, approaching somewhat reluctantly. Héloïse motions her toward Henri Rami’s office and follows her in.
Georgette continues, “Last night, on the way home, I went past Mr. Ambi’s house in town. It was all locked up, and the front yard looked as though it hadn’t been maintained at all the whole summer. I’m quite sure he hasn’t come back from his holidays yet. We could ask the neighbors.”
“It just doesn’t make sense,” exclaims Héloïse.
“I called our business advisory association to ask what to do if he’s absent for several days without us having any news of him. I didn’t dare call initially, because Mr. Rami didn’t want to pay the annual fees for the association’s services.”
“You’ve done the right thing, Georgette. And what did they say? He hasn’t been missing from work for long.”
“They told me that we can’t file a missing person report with the police. As you know, only the family of someone who has gone missing can do that.”
“Isn’t there anyone here at the factory who knows him well enough to know where he might be, or who has any means of contacting him or his family?”
“I haven’t been able to find anyone. But Léon remembered that when he looked up the dialing code for Canada last May, in order to send a request for a quotation on some maple wood, Mr. Ambi was able to give it to him right away. Léon asked him if he knew the dialing codes for every country by heart. Mr. Ambi answered that he knew this particular code because his wife’s family lived there— not far, as it happens, from our wood supplier whom, oddly, he also knew.”
“Well, that’s not much, but I guess it’s a start. Thank you, Georgette. Everything’s going well otherwise?”
Georgette shrugs, with the attitude of someone who is always quite certain of things. “Things are fine, ma’am.”
“Georgette, you can call me Héloïse.”
Georgette seems to roll her next words in her mouth before she speaks them. “Mr. Rami gave signing authority for large sums of money to no one but Mr. Ambi. Léon’s purchase orders are about to get blocked.”
“What about Hubert? Can’t he do it?”
Georgette hesitates still longer, coughing a little, nervously. “It’s just that Mr. Rami withdrew Mr. Lancien’s signing authority when Mr. Ambi joined the company. In any case, Mr. Lancien is often away for long periods, so it isn’t really practical”—she coughs again, and continues—“and it was only ever Mr. Rami who could decide about the temporary workers. Jean-Marc in the metal shop can’t take much more. He’s asked me three times if he can just decide on his own to hire some people.”
Héloïse looks at Georgette inquisitively. “Why was my father so much more careful when it came to labor costs than he was when it came to buying wood for the factory? Surely the wood must be very expensive.”
Georgette’s eyes light up and a barely perceptible smile of disdain plays at her lips. “Actually, as I pointed out to Mr. Rami, when it comes to cost of goods sold, the biggest portion, 47 percent, goes toward salaries. But, whether the twenty-four salaried employees are categorized as ‘direct’ or ‘indirect’ employees, their salaries count as fixed expenses, because we pay them every month. We never have more than four temporary workers in the ‘direct’ category during the three months that we hire them, to help during the peak period of production and during our regular workers’ holidays. That is to say, we have a maximum increase in the workforce of 4 percent during one-quarter of the year. Because the salaries for temporary workers are low, they only represent 2 percent of our total expenditure on salaries, so when we hire temporary workers, our cost of goods sold only fluctuates up to 1 percent. Purchasing, on the other hand, represents 46 percent of our cost of goods sold, and more than half of this is spent on wood. A 10 percent increase in the price of wood therefore raises our cost of goods sold more than all of the temporary workers’ salaries put together. I know that Mr. Ambi used to work for a company that also bought wood, but it wasn’t anything like the same quality we use here. It would have been better to give him the authority to hire temporary workers than to supervise the negotiation of purchases. It would have been less risky—”
“Tell me again: who are these ‘direct’ employees?”
Georgette puffs out her chest. “Direct employees are workers that vary in number according to the amount of work that has to be done. The indirect employees on the other hand are, well, people like me, for example—office workers and workshop supervisors. Whether there’s a great deal of work or only a little, the indirect workers are always going to be there. But all the workers represent inarguably fixed expenses. It makes sense to hire temporary workers to absorb any sudden increase in the workload and not have to worry about keeping them on if the workload goes back down. The problem is, you need to train them. Once they’re trained, they often leave us, and we have to start all over again. That’s what used to drive Jean-Marc crazy, and that’s why—”
Héloïse interrupts Georgette, who is getting carried away. “Thank you, I understand. When is Hubert due back?”
“He left this morning for Saint-Nazaire. To see what happened with that order that we lost. He’ll be back on Friday.”
Héloïse gives a little smile, and says, “Good. I’ll come back on Friday morning to talk to him then. Tell Jean-Marc to be patient about the temporary direct workers until then.”
She rises from her desk. Georgette hesitates for a moment, before passing Héloïse a folder she had been concealing behind her back.
“I have some checks here that I’ve prepared for signature. There are invoices that need to be paid and are getting urgent. Perhaps you can go over them with your mother? If you’d like, I can also give her a copy of the cash-flow plan, now that we know that we won’t be getting any more orders from Saint-Nazaire.”
Héloïse sits down again and takes the sheaf of papers from her mechanically.
“Thierry’s probably got his dates mixed up,” she thinks to herself. “He’ll be back next week. Not a problem. I don’t start back at the conservatory until next Tuesday.”
Héloïse doesn’t wait until Georgette leaves before she begins to shuffle the papers absentmindedly. Her mother is the only one to be able to sign checks, as the major shareholder of the company since her husband’s death, but she is away at a health spa with a friend. Héloïse has not yet told her that “the new CEO who was going to take care of everything” had, in fact, disappeared.
“It is out of the question for me to become even more involved with the company,” she thinks. “I feel ill simply being here.”
She stares at the papers without reading them and allows the malaise to invade her very being. Feelings bombard her: irritation at Georgette’s condescending attitude and pity at both Roger Chaillou’s servile behavior and Jean-Marc Gridy’s displaced aggression.
In a flash, she remembers the resentment she had felt as an adolescent toward this place—before the argument with her father—when he had tried to interest her in the business. He had brought her to the factory to show her the new shipments of wood, explained to her how each of the machines worked, warned her of the dangers of the flying shavings in the metal shop ... and all without any acknowledgment by the machine operators, who had continued to work submissively away, while not missing a single nuance of the scene between father and daughter. This tortured Héloïse, who hadn’t heard a word her father had said. It was as though their feigned indifference had made her deaf. She had only one vague, lingering question in mind: should she be proud to be the boss’s daughter, or ashamed?
The later dispute with her father kept her from needing to find the answer. Since the age of eighteen, she had not set foot in the factory. She never saw any of the old employees again until the day of the funeral, except for one. She had met him about a year after the dispute, at the music conservatory where she taught. She hadn’t recognized the man in his street clothes, and her embarrassment about this increased tenfold when he introduced himself by saying, “I belong to the H. Rami company, I’m one of your father’s employees.” She realized in that moment that one day she would have to deal with this guilt about class, which is how she described her feelings to herself.
She lifts her head and takes a deep breath to clear her memories. Her thoughts dissolve into the sounds of musical instruments tuning up. The first notes of a Schubert sonata come back to her, but discordant. She is impatient to begin rehearsals with the string orchestra for the end-of-year concert, impatient to return to an atmosphere where people work together and strive for harmony with a healthy respect for each other’s talents. She rises briskly and exits the office, leaving the sheaf of papers behind. Hubert’s face imposes itself suddenly in her mind. If Thierry doesn’t come back, she will transfer control of the company to Hubert. After all he had done for its growth, it would only be fair. And too bad if her father turned over in his grave.
FRIDAY. 9:00 A.M. Héloïse slowly parks her car in the spot next to those of Hubert and the two workshop supervisors. She notices with a forced indifference that Thierry’s parking spot is still conspicuously empty.
“If this keeps up much longer,” she thinks to herself, “weeds will start growing there.”
She makes for the door with an air of self-assurance. Today, she wears her usual clothes: a long skirt of soft cloth and a short forest-green vest that shows her braided strawberry blonde hair to its best advantage. In fact, she is dressed for her second meeting of the day: lunch with the director of the music conservatory. They will be discussing her teaching responsibilities for the upcoming year. Her morning meeting with Hubert shouldn’t last long.
“Good morning, Hubert,” she greets him, trying to sound lighthearted.
“Good morning, Héloïse,” Hubert replies in a serious tone that she does her best to ignore.
“How was your trip to Saint-Nazaire?”
“Not good. Not only was I unable to get the chair order back, but I also discovered we are off their list of preferred suppliers for the rest of the year—off the list of our biggest customer! Their young purchaser stuck us with a failing grade when he did his evaluation, and there was nothing my friend Durois could do. This means we’ll have to renegotiate all our contracts with them, and it will take at least a year to reach the same level of sales with this line of products.”
Héloïse motions to Hubert to sit in one of the metal chairs by the small table, and takes a seat opposite him. He looks overwhelmed, and Héloïse gives him her undivided attention as he continues.
“This is very bad news. But, to be honest, it doesn’t surprise me. As you know, we have three product lines. The first is the ‘Catamer’ line, consisting of chairs, tables, and armchairs for luxury pleasure craft like the ones built in the shipyards at Saint-Nazaire. These are the upscale products we have always produced. They have made the company’s reputation due to their consistent high quality. We design and make them ‘to order’ based on the customer’s design and schedule. We have several customers in Saint-Nazaire, and they all know each other, as they meet in the shipyards. Our competitive advantage was largely due to the talents of your father and Roger to choose just the right type of wood to make our creations unique, even if the designs are more or less the same over the years. But more and more customers lose patience when we don’t deliver on time and charge us a penalty since they have to pay for the dry dock time. This product line is our most important in terms of revenue and margin.”
Hubert stops for a moment to let Héloïse absorb this information. She just sits there, impassively. He carries on.
“Then we have chairs, tables, and desks for community-use buildings like schools, cafeterias, and students’ and seniors’ residences. This product line, called ‘Collectivité,’ is high-volume, with inexpensive products. We make them ‘to stock’ because the customer lead time—I mean the time the customer is willing to wait—is shorter than our cumulative lead time—the time needed to get the material and make the products. The prices are practically set in advance because these are institutional customers. We don’t make a great deal of money on this product line because of our distribution costs. Our competitive advantage is the agility of a small company. We are able to meet very short last-minute deadlines for very diverse volume requests. In this product line, our customer service level is better than our competitors’—even though, to be frank, it is not very good. We do intense and expensive firefighting to react to those orders. I made a copy of the summary of these competitive advantages by product line for you. Thierry asked me to do this for him since it has something to do with how he organizes the supply chain.” Hubert pushes a paper toward Héloïse and continues.
“Finally, your father developed the ‘Boutique’ line. These metal-and-wood products are custom-made for boutiques selling ready-to-wear, ecologically sustainable clothing. We were able to break through in this market thanks to our reputation for high quality, and we were able to gain a substantial market share by undercutting our competition, without even intending to do so. However, these customers really care more about our delivery time and reliability than they do about price. We design and make this furniture ‘to order,’ based partly on standardized sub-assemblies that we combine with elements—such as airconditioning and sound systems—furnished by the customer. We install the whole thing in the customer’s store only when the boutique is completely ready.
“Your father was proud of this product line, because it was he who had opened up this new market, thanks to Thierry, I suppose. Thierry convinced us all that we could expand in this market, especially in retail chains. We could produce some sub-assemblies ‘to stock’ in order to shorten the customer lead time. Customized assemblies could then be done ‘to order’—and in record time, since we would be able to break down the process into two independent steps.”
Héloïse looks surprised. Hubert carries on, with a wave of his hand, as if to push the whole idea aside for the time being.
“Anyway, I’m not sure how this would really work since we didn’t reach that stage. Your father first met Thierry Ambi at a furniture trade show. The problem is that we don’t really know the boutique market. We lose a great deal of time when installing on-site. The architects’ drawings use approximate measures that are difficult for our shop people to read and translate into part specifications. We’ve lost money on all Boutique orders up to now. As a consequence, your father wanted to cut corners on the Catamer line to balance the loss on the Boutique line—as though the Catamer orders would continue to stream in all by themselves, no matter what the quality.”
There is bitterness in Hubert’s voice, and it makes Héloïse feel ill at ease to hear it. She knows full well that it was Hubert who had won the orders for the Catamer line during the early years of his collaboration with her father. It had certainly been easy enough for him to come into contact with potential customers, since most of his wealthy relatives and friends owned yachts. All Hubert had to do was spend a Sunday hunting with one or another of them. After an excellent meal, it was rare for someone to not let himself be convinced to buy something from this young socialite who was actually involved with a business start-up. Much of Henri’s rise from son of a craftsman to successful businessman was due in large measure to Hubert’s skills as a salesman.
Hubert presses on. It clearly does him good to talk. He leans forward as he speaks, and his words come faster and faster. Héloïse doesn’t dare interrupt him.
“Anyway, the workers started to work on the Catamer line as they would on the Collectivité line—that is, as quickly as possible, and with the least expensive components. Three times in a row they sent attachments for the straight chairs in place of the ones for the armchairs. Of course they didn’t fit. But I know it wasn’t the workers’ fault. Your father wanted to reduce inventory by any means, because he thought that carrying inventory was the root of all our problems.”
Hubert’s face, normally so serene, becomes flushed. Héloïse has never seen him like this before.
“Let me say that selling our products at lower prices does not entitle us to disrespect our customers, whoever they may be. ‘Quality is free.’1 ‘Done quickly, done correctly’ has never cost more than ‘done quickly, done poorly.’ And just because we’ve named one of the supervisors ‘head of quality control’ doesn’t mean that all managers shouldn’t be involved in quality management. Our strong suit seems to be finding a scapegoat when things go wrong.”
Hubert suddenly stops, sensing he has gone too far. This is certainly the first time he has ever allowed himself to speak so critically of Henri Rami. And in front of his daughter, no less! Héloïse seems stupefied, as if taking measure of the transgression. There is an awkward silence. Then she just dives in.
“You know, Hubert, I’ve been thinking. While we’re waiting for Thierry Ambi to come back—or, for that matter, if he doesn’t come back ...” Her stomach knots as she tries to find a tactful way to put it. “Look, Hubert, you’re clearly the one who is the most capable of taking over the company. I don’t understand any of it myself ... and besides, I’m due to start teaching again next week.”
Hubert looks at her, stunned. “You can’t be serious, my dear.”
“Why not? You’re the obvious choice.”
“But Héloïse, I don’t want to.”
Héloïse grows wide-eyed. “What do you mean you don’t want to?”
“Look. I’m not a pawn in this game. As you can imagine, I’ve built another life for myself over the past few years. That’s the life that interests me now. Your father never thought to make me a shareholder in his company, despite our agreements at the beginning ...” Hubert trails off before continuing with great caution. “You’ll forgive me if I’m telling you things that you’d rather not hear, but you need to understand me. I’ve always done my work to the best of my abilities, but when I realized that your father only wanted one thing, namely to ensure his succession by you—or, more accurately, by the company’s future CEO that he dreamed you would marry ...”
Héloïse is shaken. Hubert doesn’t pause.
“... I turned it to my advantage and started, more than ten years ago, to become more involved in my hunting club.”
Hubert is speaking of an equestrian hunting team. She knows that he hunts stag and wild boar regularly in the nearby Amboise forest and that hunting with a pack of hounds is his passion.
“You’ll see one day, Héloïse, that ‘we spend our lives trying to realize the dreams we had as children.’2 It is now time for me to realize my own dream. For the last two years, I’ve been getting ready for my retirement. I only work an average of four days out of seven so that in the winter I can go hunting twice a week. In fact, this year I will need to work no more than three days a week, in order to provide more support to the hunt mistress, who is retiring and getting ready to ‘pass the whip’ to me. Your father knew this and never had any objections. Hound training starts again at the end of the month, and there are a number of young hunters who have just joined our team. I want to be there to welcome them, show them the hunting traditions, and start teaching them right away the proper respect for the forest and for animals.”
Hubert can see that Héloïse is growing even paler. Nonetheless, he carries on. He wants to tell her everything.
“Héloïse, I feel about hunting as you feel about music. When everyone is together on a hunting day, whatever our backgrounds or circumstances, we’re there to partake in a ritual that is ... sacred. Our movements have a spirit. What we do has a purpose. The large animals we hunt have no natural predators. If we left the forest to them, they’d destroy it and themselves at the same time. When the hunt is carried out as it should be, and when the stag is put at bay according to the hunting rules, it isn’t just the hounds that get a reward. The hunters, the followers, and the animals, we all share the beauty of the forest, and I believe in this way we maintain it for future generations. Each of us has a role to play, and each person involved understands the importance of it. It’s no accident that hunting with hounds now more than ever attracts people from all walks of life. In hunting, they find exactly what is missing from this company’s corporate culture—namely the joy and pride of accomplishing something meaningful together according to a tradition grounded in nature. This company has lost its soul. You need to hand it over to someone who knows how to get it back. I’m not that person, Héloïse. Not anymore.”
A long silence ensues. Héloïse and Hubert look at each other and, leaning toward one another, their minds seem to connect. Finally Héloïse speaks. “Well, I guess I’ll need to look for someone to buy the company ... or perhaps an employee to run it. But what if Thierry Ambi comes back?”
“Thierry Ambi isn’t coming back. He’s disappeared as suddenly as he arrived. At exactly the wrong time.”
“What are you trying to say? What do you know, Hubert? Tell me everything.”
“I can’t prove anything. But you must know that your father brought him into the company for reasons he didn’t want to tell me, and which didn’t seem to match Thierry’s own motivation. Your father knew things weren’t going well with the business, and ever since his heart attack two years ago he’d been looking for a successor. But, at the same time, he couldn’t afford to pay that kind of money. Therefore, when he hired Thierry Ambi, there must have been some sort of other compensation offered. In my opinion, this explains why Thierry Ambi left his previous company so suddenly. Then, once your father was no longer around to offer him whatever that compensation was, Thierry Ambi dropped us.”
“He was working in a company that made kitchen furniture, wasn’t he?”
“Yes. But barely a month after he met your father at the trade show, even though he lived in the Vosges, on the other side of France, here he suddenly was in Tours: baggage, family, everything. And then soon afterward, seemingly by chance, your father asked Roger to move out of his office. Each of the supervisors had his own office in a small prefabricated shed. He moved Roger on the pretext of naming him head of quality control for both workshops. Then your father changed the locks and shaded the windows of this shed. It really started people talking! The workers all nicknamed it ‘the coop’—like a chicken coop. Roger had to set himself up somehow at a little open table in his wood shop. That didn’t help his relationship with Jean-Marc, I can assure you!”
Hubert pauses for a moment and then, ignoring Héloïse’s somewhat annoyed look, he carries on. “Believe me, it’s a small world. This kitchen furniture manufacturer uses the same transport company that we use to ship Collectivité products. The employees of all three companies, who have known each other for years over the phone, never miss out on an opportunity to pass on gossip. It seems that Thierry’s former boss was getting ready to sue him. If you ask me, Thierry’s disappearance is more than a little bit shady. And to think he never even came to your father’s funeral!”
Héloïse sits thoughtfully for a moment and then bursts out, “So then, in your opinion, someone else should run the company?”
“Yes. You need to bring in some fresh blood. Someone who can really motivate the employees. And you need to do it soon. You can see how terrible our profits are. We’re certainly going to end the year in the red, what with this Catamer disaster. The only thing I can really do now is hit the road again to drum up new customers. It’s ten times harder and more expensive than retaining the loyalty of old customers, but it would be better for the company if I focused exclusively on this task.
“The best thing to do is to convince your mother and grandmother, as shareholders, to sell the business. And know that you can trust Georgette. Your father never even thought to give her a parking space out front, but you’ll never find someone more meticulous than she is when it comes to protecting the interests of the company. And this way, you can return to your music. It’s your passion, after all.”
Héloïse sits pensively. Then, glancing at her watch, she gasps. It is 11:30. She is going to be late for her meeting at the conservatory.
“Hubert, could you go over these papers with Georgette? I’ll be seeing my mother when she comes back on Saturday and then visiting my grandmother in Paris for the rest of the weekend. I’ll tell you what we’ve decided on Monday.”
She rises quickly, and leaves Hubert sitting there looking deflated and somber.
MONDAY. 10 A.M. Héloïse is once again on the way to the factory, but this time she takes the main road, the one that doesn’t snake along the hillside. She has also set out later this morning because she wants everything to go differently than the previous week. She secretly hopes she will find Thierry’s car in the parking lot when she gets there.
She has had a trying weekend. She and her mother spoke more that Saturday than they had in the past fifteen years. It was as though her mother was becoming a different person. They met at her place just after she returned from the health spa. Her relaxed, serene expression encouraged Héloïse to tell her everything that was going on with the company. Her mother listened coolly, and had only one response.
“Do whatever you want with the company, Héloïse. It was your father’s, and now it’s up to you to decide what’s best. You mustn’t feel that you owe anything to your parents. Today, as they say, is the first day of the rest of your life.”
Héloïse sat speechless at this. Juliette served the tea and, in a calm voice as though she were speaking of someone else, proceeded to tell her daughter about how life had been with her husband with the company between them. How being able to spend twenty-four hours a day by her husband’s side had seemed like a blessing during the early years of their marriage. She had quit playing the piano to become his accountant and had felt no regrets. The logic of numbers had quickly replaced scales and chord patterns in her affections. Then Héloïse was born, and Juliette, as the boss’s wife, had the luxury of balancing her administrative and accounting responsibilities with her duties as a mother. She sometimes brought Héloïse to the factory when the nanny was not available, which amused the employees. They often came to admire the baby when they had a break.
But, as the company’s product mix increased, the number of employees grew and so did the complexity of Juliette’s administrative work. Hubert, who had become head of sales, was bringing in more and more orders. Because of this, Juliette needed more and more help from a certified accountant, which irritated her husband. Henri became more and more tight-fisted as the company’s financial situation spiraled out of his control. He had already poured all of his resources into the company. Even his mother-in-law’s substantial contribution had not been enough when the time came to buy new machines. Henri had had to borrow money and was ultimately forced to mortgage their house.
Juliette had suggested that she study to earn certification as an accountant. By gaining these skills, she would be saving the company the cost of outside expertise. The return on investment seemed obvious to her but not to her husband, for whom the slightest expense was like a form of torture.
Henri Rami, who was entirely self-taught as a businessman and proud of it, had decided he did not believe in the value of continuing education. He had made it without anyone else’s help, he was fond of saying, and it was up to others to do the same, including his wife. She dared to respond with a wistful smile that not everyone, thank goodness, was like him, or the world would be overpopulated with CEOs. Henri had conveniently forgotten that at the core of his business were the woodworking skills he learned as a young man from his craftsman father. He invariably finished by saying: “Good luck only comes to those who deserve it.”
Juliette wasn’t like her husband. She had taken enormous pleasure in learning new pieces of music with different teachers who opened her up to different nuances of tone. She was terribly hurt by this refusal by her “boss” and grew increasingly depressed. She had already sacrificed her thirst for perfection in music and had no intention of doing the same in her substitute profession.
Gradually she chose to be shrewd, becoming less and less efficient at the office. It soon became necessary to hire an assistant, someone who rapidly became indispensable. Juliette chose a competent successor, who soon gained an essential skill that she herself had lost: the ability to admire Henri Rami unreservedly. This successor, Georgette, soon replaced Juliette in holding the financial purse strings of the company, and when the latter told her husband she’d return to the piano to help Héloïse with her musical studies, Henri Rami didn’t so much as blink.
Juliette never forgave him for this indifference. From that day, their relationship became that of mere housemates.
This deterioration in her parents’ relationship had affected Héloïse since she was fifteen. She became determined to gain financial independence as soon as possible, so that she could move out of the family home. But to hear now, all at once, how her parents had come to that impasse, and especially to discover her mother’s real personality, was overwhelming.
To change the subject, she finally brought up the disappearance of Thierry. Her mother seemed somewhat hesitant and a little confused when the topic was broached. In Juliette’s opinion, it was very important to understand as quickly as possible what had happened to him.
“The whole thing’s a bit mysterious,” she added, apparently not wanting to say more. She proposed that she talk directly to Pierre, the brother of Paul, the mechanic who fixed up old cars and who had repaired Héloïse’s old Fiat 500. Pierre was a unique man who had been more fortunate than his brother. He had joined the police force at a young age and had done very well there. Recently retired, he would no doubt be happy to help Héloïse find out what had happened.
In the meantime, Juliette asked Héloïse to convene an extraordinary board meeting of the shareholders, in order to name Héloïse as chairperson of the board in Juliette’s place. As such, Héloïse would be able to sign all necessary papers by herself. This would be Juliette’s final act as part of the H. Rami company.
When Héloïse left, she felt drained but also somewhat relieved to see her mother so determined to turn the page and start afresh. She knew that from now on, she would no longer speak with her mother about decisions concerning the business. Now, she must see her grandmother who, as a shareholder, would have to approve such decisions in any case.
She caught the last express train of the day. The high-speed train, the TGV, ensured that in less than two hours she was sitting on the sofa in her grandmother’s apartment at 38 Lubeck Street, a nineteenth-century, Hausmannian-style apartment situated in the heart of Paris. Its windows on the third floor—the chic one—offered an unobstructed view of the Eiffel Tower.
Comfortably ensconced on the leopard-skin cushions, Héloïse told her grandmother the whole story. Geneviève, a Parisian through and through, spoke with the candor of those women who have had enough life experience to allow themselves an opinion on everything. That which she had not lived personally she had experienced vicariously through the countless films she had seen and books she had read, especially since she had retired from her artistic career more than twenty years ago.
She listened attentively to her granddaughter, and then burst forth. “You modern women! You have opportunities that no women in history have ever had. You can live your lives as housewives or happily single, as artists or business leaders, and no one will ever question your choice. In your place, ma chérie, a man would feel obliged to rise to the challenge, lest he be taken for a coward. You have the skills to run this business, at least for as long as it takes to find a buyer who will give you a good price and to assure your mother’s financial future—which, frankly, isn’t looking too good at the moment. If I were you, I’d give it a try. You’ve got to try everything at least once in this life to find out what it is you really prefer to do. Besides, being your own boss—that’s something in itself!”
These words startled Héloïse, who had suffered the bad humor of the head of her music conservatory the day before, because she had been late for their meeting. She wasn’t able to get even half of the rehearsal space or time slots that she had asked for in order to prepare adequately for the end-of-year concert. This pettiness shocked her and she found herself thinking, “If I were in charge of managing people, I would never allow myself to be vengeful just because someone arrived late!”
She spent the night at her grandmother’s, but slept poorly. At breakfast, Geneviève raised the subject again, starting with something Héloïse had heard her say before. “You just tell me what you decide to do with the business. I’ll go along with whatever you want. What does Thomas say?”
“You know, Thomas and I decided at the beginning of our relationship that each of us would do whatever we thought best for ourselves, first and foremost. It’s really the only way we can stay happy together.”
“All the same, you might not be able to ‘make music’ together as often as you might like ...”
“That may be true, Mamy, but Thomas is away more frequently these days to tour with his chamber music ensemble. We always agreed that whichever of us became successful first would make as much out of it as possible. It won’t last forever, as you well know.”
“Yes, yes. I know what you are saying, and I also know what I am talking about,” responded Geneviève. “At least you’re not being taken in by all that fairytale business about ‘looking for your other half.’ Two people together are always two people and more, not merely two halves.”
After such a heavy weekend, Héloïse felt disturbed and unable to decide anything. She got into her car that Monday morning to set out for the factory without much thinking. She will see how she feels on-site.
When she gets there, she stares at the two spaces left empty by the absences of Thierry Ambi and Henri Rami. It doesn’t look like she’d be replacing any parking signs today.
The weather has changed over the past week. Clouds dull the sky, and the wind bends the trees over the parking lot. Héloïse struggles to open the door to the building, and it slams noisily behind her. All the offices are empty. She heads for reception where she nearly runs into Léon, who quickly moves away from Yasmina and tries his best to appear nonchalant. He stammers slightly in telling her that the others are upstairs in a meeting.
Héloïse climbs the spiral staircase and hesitantly opens the door to the conference room. The strained atmosphere plunges her back into the previous week.
Hubert is leaning on the table, which is covered with papers, and Georgette looks frozen. Roger stands stiff as a board, his mouth half-open as though he were watching TV news coverage of an armed conflict. The two opponents are again Jean-Marc Gridy and Hubert Lancien who are arguing sharply with each other.
“If you’d only give us accurate sales forecasts, we wouldn’t have all these problems!”
“But, my friend, if forecasts were accurate, you would call them orders!”
Always defensive of his metal shop, Jean-Marc carries on. “Anyway, we can’t just keep on working in a fog like this!”
Georgette manages to unfreeze herself and says in her caustic tone, “If you don’t make any kind of a sales forecast, you’re effectively forecasting no sales at all. And that’s always worse than an inaccurate forecast! Mr. Ambi always said that, and he would add: ‘Plan now or groan later.’”3
“I never said I didn’t want to make any forecast at all,” sighs Hubert. “But I can’t do anything more than express the forecasts in the customer’s own words for each of our product lines. The forecasts get updated at the monthly S&OP meeting. That’s not the point of this weekly master production schedule meeting—which by the way I am not even supposed to attend! It’s too late to adapt our resources, and too detailed. How am I supposed to tell you how many chairs we’re going to sell, and of which model? Do you think the customers themselves even know what they’re going to want in two months’ time? However, what I can certainly tell you is that since we lost our contract with Saint-Nazaire, our sales in the Catamer line are going to drop by 10 to 20 percent for at least the next year. Our only chance to compensate for this now is to pull out all the stops in developing the Collectivité line, by delivering strictly to the customer due dates. But, for pity’s sake, don’t ask me which model!”
“But if you don’t tell us which model, how will Léon know what components to supply?”
“It isn’t up to me to make those calculations. You need to go back through our order history and find the right mix of models there. Thierry said something about some solution and was supposed to do all that!”
Jean-Marc, whose chair faces the door, is the first to notice Héloïse. He gestures with a nod of his head to indicate her presence to the others, who all sit facing him. Héloïse enters and goes around the table, shaking hands. There is now a heavy silence, which she breaks suddenly.
“I believe I sat through a conversation similar to this one just last week. I will sit down with Hubert and we will go over the sales forecast together. But for next week, I don’t imagine that you’ll be able to manufacture more products than Léon has the material for, will you?”
This question, although asked somewhat hesitantly, makes a strong impression nonetheless. Georgette produces a sheet of paper from her notebook and chimes in, “All we need to do is follow Mr. Ambi’s notes on the ‘master production schedule’ process. It is written here that our goal is to make a realistic schedule of what products we want to manufacture once we have verified the availability of components and the balance between the load and the capacity at the bottleneck.”
Jean-Marc’s eyes pop out of his head. “What do you know about bottlenecks? You’ve never even set foot in the workshop!”
Georgette leafs through her notes with an air of indifference. “I know exactly what bottlenecks are. Roger showed me. It is where the sub-assemblies are stuck, just before the machine with the lowest capacity. That spot determines the rate of production for the whole shop floor.”
Roger swallows, nodding his head in agreement. Jean-Marc looks at him furiously and says, “Wherever the bottleneck is, I just don’t have enough people!”
Roger speaks up. “But I’ve got too many people in the wood shop. We ordered the locks for the desks for that college in Saumur too late. So we can’t deliver them. The wood shop is full of desks without locks. Our guys can’t even turn around down there!”
“I don’t see what that’s got to do with me!” Jean-Marc retorts.
“Look, I could send over some young guys. They’d surely be able to help you with something.”
“You’re not going to start talking about ‘multiskills’ again, are you?” Jean-Marc turns toward Héloïse as if to call her as witness. “This was all Thierry Ambi’s idea. ‘Multiskills’! ‘Multiskilled matrix’! As though woodworkers could do the same job as metalworkers. Locksmithing is a real profession. You can’t just change people’s work like that! Besides, your father didn’t approve.”
Hubert gets up, exasperated. “I’ll leave it to you all. I’m going to show the sales forecasts to Héloïse. Georgette, I’d like you to stay here and help them commit to a master production schedule for at least this week, after verifying what we have in stock. For the coming months, I’ll tell you what my forecasts look like per product line and you can use them as you want.”
The room is silent as Héloïse and Hubert leave, but it doesn’t last long. The din of voices can be heard again even before they reach the bottom of the stairs.
They sit down in Hubert’s office, and Héloïse says, “So. Would you please explain to me how you come up with these sales forecasts?”
Hubert pulls a file labeled “Sales Forecasts, Budget, and Updates” from a drawer in his desk.
“Let me start by explaining a common-sense principle that no one ever wants to hear. Since a forecast is always wrong, you have to use a margin of uncertainty— that is to say, you build a best-case/worst-case scenario. Then as you go along the rolling planning horizon, and get more information from the market, you can refine this margin of uncertainty. Planning ahead to guide the company in taking appropriate risks is the salesman’s most important task.”
“I see. It’s just like when Thomas must predict how full the concert hall will be for the duration of a tour when a big part of it depends on the weather.”
“Exactly. So for the Catamer product line, taking into account our quality problems, the variability of the forecast should be increased from 5 to 30 percent. For the Collectivité line, once schools are back in session, they want us to deliver the same product again and again. We call this ‘replenishment.’ The variability— provided of course that we stick to the deadlines—is small; I’d say 10 percent. Now, for the Boutique product line, we’ll have to choose our battles. In my opinion, the variability will be 20 percent. So, with these new assumptions of variability in mind, I’ve looked at the forecasts I made for all of these lines at the beginning of the year and I updated them.”
Héloïse looks at the numbers, and then grabs a calculator.
“If we multiply the sales figures in the budget for each of the product lines, considering the variability of each,” Héloïse murmurs as she calculates, “we get a forecast of global sales figures of around €2 million, give or take 9.5 percent. But if we take your new assumptions of variability of the forecast into account it becomes €2 million, give or take 22 percent. This obviously isn’t the same thing at all. If I understand correctly, you need to anticipate the best decisions to make, based on both an optimistic scenario and a pessimistic one. This way, you are not taken by surprise.” Héloïse slowly takes in the enormous strategic importance of the calculations she has made.
Hubert looks on in admiration. “Exactly. And these scenarios don’t lead to the same operations-management decisions. With a 10 percent margin of uncertainty, you can add overtime hours or introduce flexible work hours easily. But with 22 percent, you’ll need to either subcontract the work or to lay off extra workers. You see, if your planning horizon isn’t far enough, you won’t have enough time to anticipate these decisions.” He looks at the numbers. “Things really aren’t so bad for this year, since we luckily have three-quarters of the orders planned for the year in our backlog already. We really only have to recalculate our sales forecasts with the new margin of uncertainty for the last four months of the year. And, for next year, the best thing to do would be to use a planning horizon of eighteen months, so that our annual budget could be based on it.”
He thinks for a moment, and then adds, “This is what we should be considering at our monthly S&OP meetings, like the one we had last Monday. We not only need to do these calculations but anticipate their impact on our own resources and on our suppliers’ resources when we consider the different scenarios. That’s what Thierry is supposed to do.” He pushes the papers aside. “What did you decide with your mother and grandmother, if it’s not too indiscreet to ask?”
“No question concerning the company is too indiscreet for you to ask,” Héloïse answers without hesitation. “I’ve decided to take care of the company while looking for a buyer, as if Thierry Ambi won’t be coming back. I’m going to need everyone’s support, but especially yours. The month-ends are going to be difficult.”
Hubert smiles unreservedly. “You know you can count on me, Héloïse. I’ve always been loyal. And I’m not the only one. You’ll see.”
1 From Philip B. Crosby, an American consultant in total quality.
2 From Pierre Pasquet, founder of l’équipage de vénerie d’Amboise (the hunting team of Amboise, in France).
3 From Leonardo da Vinci, an Italian artist, philosopher, and engineer.
