In this argument, the author cites the fact that the company’s falling revenues coincide with
delays in manufacturing to imply us that the delays in manufacturing caused the reduced revenues.
To avoid these issues happened again ,the author suggest that they should move the purchasing
manager,who has excellent background in general business, psychology and sociology, but know little
about properties of metals , to the sales department and bring in a scientist from the research
division to be manager of the purchasing department. The argument is very unconvincing after we
scrutinize the logic of the reasoning, the reasons are as follows:
First of all, with the mere mention that the falling revenues coincide with delays in
manufacturing, the author can not draw conclusion that the delays in manufacturing caused the
falling revenues. As two things correlated can not fully say that one is caused by another. It
is quite possible that other factors affect the revenue, such as poor advertising, poor management,
instable merchant demand or insufficient inventories. All these factors could impact the company’s
revenue, without ruling out these factors, the author can not say that delays in purchasing caused
the falling revenues.
Secondly, the author made assumptions that change the purchase manager, the poor planning in
purchasing metals would be solved. There are serious error in these statement. Who can guarantee
that a scientist would do better purchasing planning than a good business manager? It’s possible
that the scientist knew nothing about the supply and demand market of the material, and that he has
no management experience that the fellows can not coordinate well with him. Changing the current
purchasing manager with a research scientist is not a way to solve the problem. The author should
provide us more information about the manufacturing department, such as the material purchase plan,
the hierarchy of the management and the layout of the job specifications to let us know more about
the functions of the department, so that we can investigate what has caused the poor planning in
purchasing department. Without further information provided, we can not agree with the author that
simply change the purchasing manager would solve the problem.
In conclusion, this is a weak argument. we can see the author made false causation and assumption
in this argument, to strengthen the argument, the author should provide us more information about
the company’s inside operation system such as sale department and manufacturing department.