Fable
The saltworks drew up the breakup path on the day it signed, and only later did it avoid a production halt
A seaside saltworks hired a company to manage the salt-drying carts, warehouses and shipping accounts. The new system made daily output much clearer, and the owner soon handed over most of the process.
The accountant reminded him that at signing he should also ask a sobering question: if in three years they no longer use this company, how do the salt, the accounts, the people and the carts exit? The owner thought it was too early; the celebration wine was not yet cold, so there was no need to talk about the ending first.
A year later, the other party was acquired, service prices rose, and support slowed. The saltworks wanted to change suppliers, but found that historical accounts could only be viewed in the old system, the fleet scheduling format could not be exported, and the workers only knew how to operate that interface.
Someone suggested a hard cutover. After one day of trying, the warehouse shipped two batches of salt to the wrong place, finance lost a stretch of reconciliation records, and no one followed up on customer complaints. Shutting down the system was more dangerous than continuing to pay—the salt works seemed bound to its old pier by its own processes.
The site owner had to make an exit plan after the fact: list all materials, interfaces, accounts, processes, training materials, contractual obligations, and unfinished orders, and divide them by risk into three categories: must migrate first, can run in parallel, and archive last.
Before a new supplier enters, the old supplier must provide an export package, field descriptions, transition support and a deletion certificate. The saltworks arranged a two-week dual run, checking production, inventory and customer receipts daily; if anything was wrong, they stopped and fixed it first.
Migration was still troublesome, but production did not stop. Most importantly, the saltworks wrote exit clauses into the next contract: data ownership, export frequency, transition-period pricing, assistance obligations, and destruction after service termination.
The farm owner later told others that an exit plan is not pessimism, but procurement maturity. Being able to leave is what shows that today's cooperation is not forced; daring to write the exit route clearly makes cooperation more stable instead. The accountant later wrote this into the procurement checklist: the deeper the entry, the earlier the exit question must be asked. Those seemingly awkward questions are exactly what can expose whether a supplier locks customers in. Being able to rehearse leaving once is what gives the salt field the confidence to hand over more processes. Later the salt field also rehearsed a small-scale relocation once a year. Not because it was eager to break up, but to confirm the keys were still in its own hands, so that when change really came it would not be forced to halt production. Later, during the retrospective, everyone wrote this lesson into the daily rules: first look at where on site the result truly changed, then decide what to keep, what to repair, and what to limit.