The Rush-Order Checklist I Use at PPG: 6 Steps Before You Commit to a Deadline

In my role on PPG's industrial specialty team, coordinating emergency shipments of coatings, sealants, and specialty chemicals, I've handled 220+ rush orders in the last six years. The pattern is usually the same. A contractor calls on a Tuesday, says a deadline moved up, and asks: "Can you match this spec by Friday?" Then we spend half the call resolving things that should have been confirmed in the first five minutes.

If you're a facility manager, a contractor, or a buyer who has ever made a phone call with a "please tell me this gets here by Friday" tone in your voice, this list is for you. Six checks, about 20 minutes total. It won't make rush orders pleasant. It will keep them from becoming your own fault.

1. Confirm the Product Name, Grade, and Concentration

The most common mistake is ordering by product name alone. A facility engineer once called because a heat-transfer loop wasn't performing. Someone had bought "propylene glycol" from a discount vendor. What arrived was a 99% industrial concentrate, but the system design assumed a 30% inhibited mix. The heat capacity of propylene glycol in pure form is roughly 2.5 kJ/kg·K—water is about 4.2—so concentration changes everything: heat transfer, flow rate, freeze protection. A 30% mix is a genuinely different product than a 99% concentrate, no matter what the drum label says.

If you can't write the product name, the concentration, and the one performance property you actually care about in a single line, keep digging until you can.

2. Verify the Powder Coating Spec Against the Substrate

AAMA 2603 powder coating is the baseline specification for pigmented organic coatings on aluminum extrusions and panels. It's used on a lot of commercial storefronts, entrance frames, and railing systems. As of January 2025, it's still the most commonly referenced AAMA standard I see in project specs—which is fine, until someone writes "AAMA 2603" into a project that actually needs a higher tier.

Everything I'd read early in my career said the higher the spec tier, the better the coating, full stop. In practice, I've seen the opposite mistake just as often: teams overspecifying to AAMA 2605 for interior frames that never see sunlight. The right question is exposure. Interior door frames under a covered walkway? AAMA 2603 is probably adequate. Seacoast exterior facade? That's a different product class entirely. Getting it backwards is expensive in both directions—you either pay for performance you don't need, or you watch the coating fail and take the client's trust with it.

3. Learn the Physical Site Before You Promise a Delivery Time

This sounds obvious. It is not. Let me use a venue example, because venue logistics expose every assumption you can make about "delivery."

PPG Paints Arena in Pittsburgh. Most people assume a modern downtown arena has straightforward freight access. Ask the facility manager and you'll learn that the PPG Paints Arena seating map tells you where Section 123 is—but not that the access corridor to that section is hand-cart only, and that a pallet jack won't fit through the service door. I watched a subcontractor hand-carry fourteen powder-coated panels through a hallway because the loading dock was available, but the path from dock to install point was not.

(For context: what was PPG Paints Arena before? It opened in 2010 as the Consol Energy Center, and PPG acquired the naming rights in 2016. People often mix it up with the old Mellon Arena, the former Civic Arena, across the street—demolished in 2012, a different building entirely.)

Before you commit to a delivery window, call the facility manager and ask three questions: Which dock? What equipment is allowed on the concourse? Is there an event the next day blocking access? The last 150 yards is the risky part.

4. Put the Deadline in Writing, Including the Word "Rush"

I knew I should get written confirmation from a vendor we'd used a dozen times. I thought, "what are the odds? We've worked together for years." That was the one time it mattered.

The vendor verbally confirmed a Friday delivery. The material arrived the following Wednesday. They weren't even deliberately slow—the job just never got logged as an emergency, because the word "rush" never made it into an email.

The fix is a one-line confirmation that includes the date, the time, the dock address, and the sentence: "This order is marked as rush." Copy the client. Copy your own procurement person. If the vendor hesitates to acknowledge that in writing, consider it useful information about how much their rush commitment is actually worth.

5. Appoint a Gatekeeper for Non-Technical Chaos

This step sounds soft. It isn't.

During a venue setup, a project coordinator forwarded an email to me asking: "Are black eyed peas a starch?" It was a food-service question, completely unrelated to our shipment. But she was drowning, the food-service vendor was chasing her, and our address was the one that had responded fastest the day before. That's how random questions find you in an emergency.

Are black-eyed peas a starch? Technically they're a starchy legume, if that helps your menu planning. But that's not the real point. The real point is that in an emergency, every question feels urgent, and operational noise will always steal focus from whoever is most responsive. Appoint one person to screen the noise. Keep your technical people on the actual technical problem.

6. Inspect With the Client's Eyes Before You Call It Done

I skipped the final quality check once because we were two hours behind and "the product is basically the same as last time." It wasn't. A missed scan on the line meant 72 cartons went out with a minor finish defect. The client didn't complain at delivery. They just never asked us for pricing again.

Quality is how the client judges your company in the first thirty seconds of looking at what you delivered. If the finish looks wrong, the explanation you give on a follow-up phone call will not undo that first impression. Ten minutes of inspection costs little; rebuilding a client's trust costs a lot more.

Final Note: This Checklist Is Boring On Purpose

It takes about 20 minutes the first time. It prevents the two phone calls nobody wants to make: "The delivery is delayed" and "The material doesn't match the spec."

Honestly, I'm still not sure why some suppliers consistently beat their quoted rush timelines while others miss by a mile. My best guess comes down to internal buffer habits. But the checklist doesn't depend on the supplier being perfect—it protects you either way.

And if a supplier treats your spec-verification questions as an inconvenience, that's a data point. A good supplier has seen the same burned-out look on customers' faces many times, and knows why a rush-order checklist is worth the twenty minutes.