Everyone wants to deliver products timely and help their customers meet even the tightest deadline, but sometimes the timeframes are totally unrealistic. We were recently asked to deliver a significant quantity of signs in one week. Mind you the materials were not stock items and we would need to have them shipped to us from our supplier. Because of the short delivery window we instead sought out a local supplier at a higher price, thinking that the premium pricing was warranted given that they could deliver the sign blanks more quickly. When we informed the customer that the very best we could do was a 10 day delivery and informed him of the price, he told us not to bother.
The problem here was that we had spent a full day bird-dogging how to get the timeliest delivery possible and we had contacted more than one supplier. Yet, because the expectation was unrealistic to begin with, we still did not get the job. Should we have declined the order and not even tried to help the customer out? Probably not. Obviously, there is no right answer. We do our best to help our customers out, no matter what, but in the end poor planning costs everyone!