Quote:
Originally Posted by Da_Nit
What’s the chances that SJ may realize the office grind is less of a grind than the $1/$2 NL grind?
Somewhere around 3.5%.
A number of issues come up when dealing with vendors from Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. The biggest one is the time difference. On the East Coast, I'm never working at the same time as my colleagues in Asia, so when I make a request for a quote at 8AM on a Tuesday, the fastest I can expect an answer is 8AM on Wednesday.
My customers are maintenance and repair techs dealing with million dollar assembly lines that have broken down because of a little $300 part from Asia that no one in the USA seems to have in stock. Jobs are on the line and bosses from several vertical levels are breathing down their neck, and my day is spent telling them over and over again that I won't even know relevant details about their part until some time the next day.
Then there's arriving at work the next morning and seeing that I still don't have an answer from Asia. Sometimes the overseas vendors don't answer at all and don't give a reason for it; other times they ask inane follow-up questions: What is the application of the part? Who is the end user? You said you wanted a circuit board, do you want the control board (which you've asked for the last 27 times running) or the display board (which you've never asked for)? And another entire day is wasted.
After seeing this in my emails, I know that my day will involve fielding calls from increasingly higher-ranked bosses from the customer asking why I don't have their answer yet. "Because doing business with Japan sucks a lot of the time," is not an acceptable reply, although it is an accurate one.
It helps to be precise with your English when dealing with overseas vendors. It's often the equivalent of dealing with a genie for wishes--if you're not very specific about what you need, you're going to regret it. On their end, I think a lot of the misunderstanding revolves around able to postpone doing work on a request for another day. Perhaps I'm not being empathetic enough, but years of experience have led me to this conclusion.
Last edited by suitedjustice; 08-27-2019 at 09:37 AM.