We live by one principle: “Prevention beats cure every single time.”

Instead of waiting for trouble to knock on our door, we decided to knock on trouble’s door first. Here’s how we tackled it:

Early Intelligence Gathering

We started monitoring the situation closely, keeping our ear to the ground about environmental inspection patterns across different provinces. When we began hearing whispers about inspections starting in certain regions, we immediately reached out to our supplier.

Our conversation went like this: “Hey, we’re hearing that environmental inspections are starting to ramp up in some areas. How are things looking in your province?”

The supplier was initially dismissive: “Don’t worry, our province hasn’t started inspections yet. Your order is totally safe.”

Proactive Risk Mitigation

Despite their confidence, we weren’t taking any chances. We presented our supplier with a strategic adjustment plan:

1. Accelerate all production phases where possible, especially the potentially polluting pre-processing steps
2. Parallel processing approach: Instead of completing Model A before starting Model B, we requested simultaneous pre-processing for both models (since these stages typically involve the processes most likely to be flagged during inspections)

Relationship Capital Investment

The supplier initially pushed back, thinking we were being overly cautious about a non-existent problem. But this is where years of relationship building paid off. We leveraged our long-standing partnership and emphasized that this was a special request during uncertain times.

They eventually agreed, though they made it clear they were doing this as a favor and would need to add extra workers to accommodate the process changes.