Big projects require big thinking and a tight knit ship. Every team has its strengths and every team has its flaws. Agile management moves to highlight these in an intricate way and find a way through with fast impact.
To successfully action agile management for any project, there are five clear steps to take. This guide has the information you need.
Wow! This was the headline caption on the presentation I was about to see. I had just joined the company. I had just spent the last few years in Retail. I had done a lot of research on how to improve efficiencies and productivity in Online/E-Commerce Fulfillment Distribution Centres. And I had lived through the agonizing process and resource challenges of fulfilling E-Commerce orders during the Holiday season, which is far and away the busiest time of the year in Retail.
Does your business struggle with process ownership? Are your process improvements not “sticking”? The failure of an organization to have in place well-functioning process owners is a common occurrence these days.
The root causes (if anyone cares to do a full postmortem) are numerous. We’ve heard it all before; “the organizational structure won’t allow for it”, “incentives are misaligned”, “leaders don’t understand what it takes to be a process owner” etc. I’m sure we can all relate to some or all of these statements.
Major players like Amazon and Walmart have distribution centers all over the world, pumping out packages at lightning speed.
If you want to keep your customers satisfied, you need to keep things moving in your warehouse or distribution center. Use these tips to keep up the pace and make your facility as efficient as possible.
We hear about all of this cool and exciting new technology every day. Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence, Drones and Autonomous Vehicles, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality, Big Data and more.
As such it’s easy to become enamoured with the prospects of implementing these brand new technologies in your company.
But for many companies they are struggling each and every day just to get the basics right. Ensuring deliveries are on time, making sure purchase orders are placed, changed, and acknowledged, keeping track of and reducing inventory levels, managing forecasts and forecast accuracy, and training and retaining resources are just a few of the basics that companies are working vigilantly to address every hour of every day.
Given pressures to reduce costs, improve productivity, increase competitiveness and increase asset velocity what should your strategic focus be?
When I was presenting the latest Supply Chain Strategic Plan the CEO said to me, “We’ve already spent millions on Supply Chain! Every process should be working like clockwork. Why do you need more money?”
It was true, to a degree. While I had only recently joined the company it was true that the company was investing over $10 million to upgrade and automate their Distribution Center operations.
My predecessor had spearheaded this investment. The current Distribution Center operations were unable to handle the growth, the change in product mix, and the dynamics associated with rapid fulfillment and online shopping.
But there were some fatal flaws which were at the core of their investment plan. Most significantly they failed to optimize the process first.
As a result they were spending millions of dollars automating a bad process.
Implementing a Lean program on the Manufacturing floor, in a Warehouse operation, or in a Distribution Centre is challenging enough. There are a series of process steps in which materials are transformed or moved in some fashion. Try implementing Lean in the Back Office.
And your Lean program has at its core the objective of making these operations as efficient as possible. But when you try to apply these same Lean principles to the support organizations, or the back office, you are likely to experience a wide range of reactions.
So why is it so difficult to implement, and sustain, a Lean program in the Back Office of your organization?
We had completed value stream mapping the current state processes across some very significant business processes in the company. It took a fair amount of time even though we had the active involvement of subject matter experts and leaders from every functional organization.
When all was said and done the current state involved hundreds of process steps, almost 200 pain points, and dozens of iterative, repetitive loops. The company was just being introduced to Lean process improvement techniques. And as challenging as it was to reach a common understanding of what the current processes were the difficult part was about to start.
Most definitions of disintermediation characterize it as the elimination of intermediaries, or “cutting out the middleman“.
Further consider that the “Wastes” associated with Lean thinking and principles include transportation, inventory, over production and motion amongst others. Eliminating these wastes is critical for peak performance.
Why is this relevant?
A truly efficient and effective Supply Chain must include a strategy, plans, business processes, and performance metrics that incorporate disintermediation and the elimination of waste!
First, a “Prime Objective” of the Shasta EDC is job growth in the manufacturing and technology sectors, including the use of collaborative robots. This is our key focus. However, the recruitment, retention, and expansion of our companies is equally important.
There is obviously a symbiotic relationship between employer and employees. However, from time to time there are talent gaps that emerge and technologies that force us to rethink our approaches to business.
Data shows that the number of manufacturing jobs are declining, and the jobs that remain are shifting to a mixture of the traditional and tribal knowledge around manufacturing and a blend of technical knowledge that helps to augment current manufacturing with the practical application of emerging technologies.
At Supply Chain Game Changer we believe in sharing experiences and expertise from people in every industry and from across the globe. As such we have introduced our “Seasoned Leadership in Action” Interview series at Supply Chain Game Changer. This interview is with Ron Emery, Continuous Improvement Consultant, Author and Entrepreneur.
When I was 11 years old everyone in Grade 6 was required to create and make a speech in front of the class. I wrote a speech on Air Pollution. It was an emerging issue in the news at that time. I talked about statistics on the levels of Air Pollution, the damage it was causing, and what we needed to do to curtail and fix the problem. This was long before I had heard the words Supply Chain Carbon Footprint.
I ended up winning the local and regional public speaking competitions with that speech. I didn’t actually end up doing much about Air Pollution beyond helping to promote awareness of the issue with my speech. But it did plant the idea in my mind that we all had a responsibility to create awareness and help protect our environment in whatever manner that we could.
How many times have you looked at your Distribution Centre operation and thought about how you would re-layout and streamline the process flow if you had the chance?
When you are starting with a new, empty facility it is clearly much easier to layout the operations to make the best possible flow of materials and processes. But when you have an existing operation which has evolved over a long period of time, you are likely faced with utilities, equipment, infrastructure, walls, and paradigms all of which have resulted in a rather inefficient flow of materials and people and processes.
This was the situation we had in one of our Distribution Centres. In this particular Distribution Centre the current layout of the operation had been the result of many iterations of adding new customers, new products and new processes over time with the associated fluctuations in demand for everything.
Yet with the launch of our Global Process Excellence project we had unleashed our employees to make the improvements they had imagined could be made for a long time.
From the outset, it may not seem relevant to someone who has never applied lean manufacturing processes to their manufacturing methods. On the other hand, lean manufacturing processes can really help the supply chain perform a lot better.
In fact, some of the core principles of lean can also be applied directly to supply chains for making them more productive and efficient. Stay with us as we explain the connection between the two.