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Does intuition play a role in Supply Chain execution?
This topic normally ends up in a hot debate… Scientists insist on proper cause-effect analysis and logical solutions. Practitioners, on the other hand, vouch for intuitive decisions in several execution areas, especially where time is critical. How do we decide where to apply intuition and where not to?
There are three essential pre-requisites for intuitive decisions. Firstly, the decision should be repeatable in nature… we shouldn’t apply intuition to one-off events. Secondly, there should be immediate feedback on whether our intuition was right or wrong. If this fast feedback loop doesn’t exist, we can’t refine our intuition over time. Thirdly, we should have applied it several times and got decent results.
If these three conditions are fulfilled, we can start depending on intuitive decisions in that area and continuously refine the intuitive process as we get more feedback on our decisions. It becomes a self-learning mechanism which gets better and better with more data points.