Typically, we see things in an “either\/or” context, you can do one thing at the expense of another, take your choice!. You can have line efficiency, or line flexibility, not both, advertising reach\u00a0 or frequency against a narrow target, but not both in the advertising budget, covering inventory requirements of A, or B by the end of the week , but not both. Happens very day.<\/p>\n

This trade-off is programmed into us, but has the unintended consequence of “allowing” shallow problem analysis, facilitating our “jump” to a conclusion, rather than going through the hard work of real problem\u00a0\u00a0 articulation, consideration of many possible solution options, and the testing and recalibration of hypotheses that should occur and re-iterate to identify where more data is needed, more ambiguity dissolved, and more responsibility taken.<\/p>\n

When was the last time you acted too soon, and laid all your bets on a single obvious solution being the right one, only to find the siren song of “easy and obvious” led you astray?<\/p>\n

I first came across this phenomena in the late 80’s (to my younger readers, some of us were working\u00a0 then) when my then employer was running “Ski” yoghurt down a new form\/fill\/seal machine designed for long runs to meet the demand in France, where the machinery was made. Run raspberry yoghurt for a few days, and it worked wonderfully, great in France, but for us it would have been a years stock, so we had to change flavors after little more than what would have been a changeover run in France, in many cases, less than an hour, with the attendant changeover times and start-up\/finish-run inefficiencies, which the French engineers assured us were “absolutement” unavoidable.<\/p>\n

Over a period of time, in a structured and progressive way, our fitters\u00a0 and operators who ran this piece of French engineering revenge on the rest of the world,\u00a0 using what would now be described as a PDCA continuous improvement cycle, made that machine do what its makers said was impossible, and we got both efficiency and flexibility out of it.<\/p>\n

Either\/or\u00a0 was not good enough, progressively, with many small steps, a great deal of experimentation, and recognition that the operators often had a better view of the intricacies than an engineer working off a plan, it evolved it into a “both\/and” machine.<\/p>\n

As a result, we made pots of money, because we had very low inventory levels, almost 100% order\u00a0 fulfillment , and an increasing market share because our customer service to big retailers was better than our opposition, and the consumers loved the product. Truly a lean virtuous circle!<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Typically, we see things in an “either\/or” context, you can do one thing at the expense of another, take your choice!. You can have line efficiency, or line flexibility, not both, advertising reach\u00a0 or frequency against a narrow target, but not both in the advertising budget, covering inventory requirements of A, or B by the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14526,15888,35000743,28285],"tags":[298909,18547347,140198,108946,57258962,261107],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5fjXq-u6","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.strategyaudit.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1866"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.strategyaudit.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.strategyaudit.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.strategyaudit.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.strategyaudit.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1866"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.strategyaudit.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1866\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1868,"href":"https:\/\/www.strategyaudit.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1866\/revisions\/1868"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.strategyaudit.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.strategyaudit.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.strategyaudit.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}