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Heuristics in Supply Chain need careful nurturing.
It is now well established that heuristics have an important role to play in running supply chains. Optimisation routines inherently assume certainty, which is quite far from reality. As a result, supply chain teams rely more on heuristics.
These heuristics must be nurtured carefully. The heuristics which worked in the past may not be the best for future. Teams often take a lot of effort to check if the current heuristics are working as expected. They look for evidence to confirm their hypothesis.
Do we also actively seek evidence to ascertain where a particular heuristic is no longer working? It’s a practice that is good to inculcate. If we find out certain instances where a particular heuristic has stopped giving the desired results, the market context may have changed. Should we dive deeper to check what’s happening in the market? Or the internal capabilities could have changed, for better or for worse. These are the early signals we need to tweak the heuristic or develop an entirely new one.
What’s not working often yields more precious information than what is working. However, it needs an open mindset to acknowledge and improve…