Sometimes there are good reasons to break rules, like in today’s story, but one company doesn’t seem to understand the benefits of breaking the rules until it’s too late.

The rules we’re talking about are how a product is shipped. The company making the product decides to speed up the process by delivering it directly to the distribution center, but that ends up causing a lot of drama.

Let’s see how the story plays out…

We are not allowed to ship product using anything other than a certain company? Ok. Sure.

I work in the apparel industry, and one of our customers is a company who frequently finds itself on lists of top 10 in the Americas.

From our location, one of their gigantic distribution centers is only about 90 mins away.

Once, when we did a very small order for them, result only about 10% of or MOQ, we thought instead of shipping it through a ExpressEx, why not just drop it off at their DC, since the shipping address was to their DC. It would get there faster than by ExpressEx and cheaper too.

The driver was unsuccessful.

When our driver went there, the DC refused to take delivery.

No problem, we called the person in charge on their side with our company, and we laid out the problem.

Well, the person was extremely rude and simply said,”We do NOT intend to accept any deliveries made other than the contractual method of using ExpressEx”. And shot off multiple emails to our VP, President, and our holding company’s CEO about not following contractually required methods.

So, our driver comes back, we ship the product using ExpressEx.

They decided to use ExpressEx no matter what.

3p weeks ago, a frantic call and a decently large order, but extremely urgent order.

Okay, we have our time estimates to complete the work and the shipping date we would be able to manage. Agreed upon, in email.

We shipped it through ExpressEx even though it was said to use any means necessary to try to get it to them by the shipping date.

The CEO tried to reason with the other company.

Enraging phone calls and screaming duels, our holding company’s CEO, went over the vendor manager’s head, and to their purchasing and inventory VP.

Complained about the manager’s behavior and their previous email about only using ExpressEx as contractually stated and our adherence to the shipping date, as we packed the trailer and locked it with a seal and date on it.

The ExpressEx semi came at 1:00am to pick up the trailer, not our fault. We followed the contractually stated rules.

Guess who just lost 9 major universities in college football from their vendor management portfolio?

Ouch! Getting orders delivered on time is certainly important. I wonder if the company eventually realized it needed to bend the rules sometimes.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted…

This reader hopes some things changed.

Another reader points out a problem for OP’s company.

Here’s a story about IBM…

This reader doesn’t think this story was really malicious compliance.

Another reader pointed out why the company probably turned away the delivery driver.

Sometimes it benefits everyone when a company is willing to make exceptions to the rules.

If you liked that post, check out this one about an employee that got revenge on HR when they refused to reimburse his travel.