ABC Corporation was the first large sale you made after you joined Datamatics, Inc. as a sales representative. You continue to maintain close personal contact with people at ABC, even though a sales representative reporting to you handles the account.

Last week, the responsible ABC Corporation manager gave your sales representative until tomorrow to convince him that Datamatics will be able to meet contract specifications during the last year of the contract. If the evidence is not convincing, the ABC manager said that ABC will find a new company to take over the account at the end of the contract. Your personal contacts have confirmed that ABC is indeed serious about dumping Datamatics, and that ABC management will reconsider only if your company can convince them in writing that deadlines can be met.

When you have talked to your data processing manager about missed deadlines, you have been told that it probably would not happen again. But it has happened again, several times.

The last time you talked, the DP manager offered to subcontract out ABC Corporation’s work to avoid missing another deadline. You told the DP manager that subcontracting would be unacceptable to ABC Corporation because of the confidential nature of their data, although you did not actually check with them. If work is going to be subcontracted, it will have to be someone else’s. You will have no chance of getting ABC Corporation to renew their contract if they find out Datamatics cannot handle their work internally.

This morning on the telephone, the DP manager hinted that if enough pressure was exerted, the finance and administration department might authorise the immediate purchase of another computer. Increased capacity would certainly solve the problem. However, you believe that if the DP manager would give ABC Corporation top priority, the work could get out on time.

You do not care how the problem is solved, as long as you have something in writing that will convince ABC Corporation that Datamatics is serious about servicing their account.

You know ABC would be satisfied if you could show them that the finance and administration department had authorised the immediate purchase of a new computer. They probably would accept a letter from the DP manager guaranteeing that their deadlines would be met. It would be difficult to sell ABC with anything less.

Since the meeting with ABC is tomorrow morning, you must get a decision at today’s meeting.

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Despite your best efforts, you are having trouble processing data fast enough during peak periods to meet customer deadlines. Several sales representatives have forwarded customer complaints to you, but until now you have been able to spread the late reports around so that no one customer or sales representative has gotten too upset.

Now, the sales manager is claiming that ABC Corporation is threatening to cancel its contract at the end of the year. Of course, sales people are always coming up with reasons why their customers must have better service, usually based on information from a “confidential source,” which means that it cannot be verified. But it could be true. If it is, you cannot blame the sales manager for being upset at the possibility of losing a very large account.

To handle the data processing load at the end of each month, you need a new computer now, not in a year. You can understand senior management’s reasons for not wanting to add new capacity until the last possible moment. But if you cannot provide timely service to current customers, the company may lose more business through cancellations than the new business campaign brings in.

You are always under pressure to give preferential treatment to one customer at the expense of another, but you hate to do it. It just creates another dissatisfied customer, which is hardly a solution to the problem.

You would like to subcontract work to other firms during peak periods, but in the past you have been criticised for doing so. Sales representatives maintain that their customers strongly object to having their proprietary data given to another firm for processing. Finance and Administration complains about the added expense of subcontracting, and its negative impact on profits. However, if the finance and administration manager refuses to release the funds for a new mainframe, subcontracting may be the only feasible solution.

If the ABC Corporation crisis turns out to be real, you hope it will convince the finance and administration manager that additional computer capacity is needed immediately. If not, some other solution will have to be found. You cannot afford any longer to be the scapegoat for missed deadlines.

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