How We Do Business – Part 2: Accountability
How We Do Business – Part 2
We Own Our Mistakes
This is the second in a series introducing you to five principles that describe how we do business at Pendant.
The second principle reads in full:
“We aren’t perfect and we will make mistakes occasionally. We will always own our mistakes and make things right. We will not issue change orders for our mistakes. We seek to do business with like-minded clients and suppliers, and to hire like-minded team members.”
Change Orders
Change orders are commonly used to correct mistakes in industrial automation projects, whether they are errors of omission or errors of commission. However, change orders are a pet peeve according to many prospects and clients. We believe that unless you legitimately change the scope of your project after you issue a purchase order, you should pay what we quoted you. Mistakes on our part should not affect your profitability.
A few months ago, we reviewed our most recent 300 projects to determine the incidence rate of change orders. The result confirmed that we live up to our word. Only about 8% of the projects had any change orders at all, and every one of those change orders was the result of a genuine scope change.
It would be silly to believe that the other 92% of the projects went off without a hitch on our part. But in none of those cases did we issue a change order.
The Shelf o’Tutelage
We make mistakes. We learn from our mistakes, as you can see in this earlier blog post. The Shelf o’Tutelage But we’ll never make you pay for our mistakes.
Whether you are a client, a new prospect, a supplier, or a partner, we understand that you will make some mistakes, too. If you are willing to also hold yourself accountable, you will find us very understanding. What we expect is probably no different from you – not perfection, but fairness. We think the fairest thing of all is for you to get from us what you expected at the beginning.