Hi,
When I talk about consistency I mean from one DS to another. I agree that they are hugely overworked and that is a big part of why some areas respond better than others;however, I noticed that some DS seemed to have more power than others - maybe contacts, maybe more savvy. There are some stories of DSs having someone in the factory find a car and report back. If you look at the varying stories coming back from DSs there wasn't any one consistent story. I guess I hinted at another problem in my earlier post and that is empowerment. I get the impression that most of the DSs are kept in the dark, possibly to avoid them giving away too much information. Maybe that strategy is OK in normal operations but in this scenario it created more trouble than it solved (IMHO). When my car went back into production, I naturally was concerned and phoned my DS who had a chuckle because it was ridiculous that my car would have gone back into production. He looked at two systems that showed "factory gate routing" and basically that my car was about to be loaded on a truck - thus he reassured me that all was well. It wasn't until about a day later that his boss called him and let him know that there was a problem with a bunch of cars. He never did get any information specific to my car.