Jun 12, 2009 | Management
“We do not have time for that long term stuff, we have to …..(fill in your own)… or we will not survive to worry about it”.
This is true, particularly in small business, but if you do not put aside time and energy to consider the origins of the symptoms, and treat them, all you get is steadily worsening symptoms, taking more time and resources to manage, whilst getting sicker.
Identify the problem, treat it, and the symptoms go away, leaving you do something useful with the time freed up.
Jun 11, 2009 | Demand chains, Management, Sales, Strategy
Most supply chains are driven by orders, someone reacts when an order is received.
The niggling question is always about demand, as most recognise it drives orders, inventories, innovation, competitive pressure, and so on, but is rarely measured.
Orders are at the end of the process, they arrive after making allowances for out of stocks, poor display, customers memory, competitive activity, the skill and interest of the sales person, and many other factors.
Demand is created by understanding the customer, and positioning your good or services in their minds as the best value solution available to address their need. This is longer term stuff, harder to measure, easy to ignore, but it is the foundation of commercial sustainability.
How much better would it be to have in place signals that reflect demand, they might give us an opportunity to reduce the incidence of lost opportunities, whilst better managing our investment in inventories, brands, customers, and the short term sales tactics used to stimulate an order.
Jun 10, 2009 | Management, OE, Operations
Most efforts to improve Operational Efficiency (OE) have at their core the elimination of variation in a process. It starts by setting standards, measuring the variations, and then progressively eliminating the causes of the variations, until you have a repeatable process with minimum variation.
Terrific so far.
Change in an organisation, change of any sort, has at its core a dissatisfaction with the status quo, and a determination to change it, not necessarily by the CEO, or anybody with power, but by someone who is dissatisfied with the way things are.
How do these things sit together?
The value of process conformance leading to OE are undoubted, but in gaining the benefits, we eliminate, or at least minimise, the opportunity for change, which flourishes on diversity.
Change, or non conformance, brings risk and growth, high levels of conformance brings a death by boredom, but both are necessary for organisations to flourish.
This is another paradox that challenges the leadership of organisations, one not generally recognised by those who advocate “Lean” thinking, of which I am one, and its cousin “6 Sigma“, but something that leaders perhaps need to consider in the way they go about nurturing the culture of the organisations they run.
Jun 9, 2009 | Management, Operations
Further to the earlier post, “An agile demand chain” that drew the distinction between agility and flexibility, consider the differences between efficiency and agility.
In many plants, efficiency has been built at the expense of agility, as long runs of product dominate the thinking of many operational managements.
Agility without efficiency is a way to a quick commercial death, as competitors will be aggressive with prices once they realise their costs are lower than yours. The leading symptom is high unit costs driven by low machine availability.
Efficiency without agility will take far longer to impact, but ultimately is no less commercially lethal, as consumers will abandon an offering that becomes “stale” in a competitive environment. The symptom is high finished goods inventory to accommodate infrequent but long production runs .
Jun 8, 2009 | Marketing, Sales, Strategy
Yesterday I went to a free concert in Darling Harbour in Sydney, and saw Jeff Lang who plays “my music” the blues, and must be one of the best lap slide players in the world.
Point is, it was free, and he rocked the place, and judging by the reaction, he engaged with a lot of people who had never heard of him, and certainly had never seen him, and under normal circumstances, would never buy a CD of his, but they did yesterday, in truck-loads, and he hung around and signed stuff, smiled, laughed, and generally was nice to people.
Here was a world class player, engaging with people who were now avid fans of his, and who would remember the day, and continue to buy his albums long after the free sample. They may not have paid to be there, but will pay for a long time to come.
Free stuff sells, when it is good enough, different enough, and has a character and integrity people can relate to.
