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How effective is your exception monitoring process?
The importance of exception monitoring is gaining ground in managing supply chains. Defining exceptions and monitoring them is key to the process of ongoing improvement.
In many companies, however, effectiveness of the exception monitoring process itself is questionable. I was talking to the supply chain team of a business which had decided to stop pushing stocks to its distributors and instead rely on pure replenishment orders. They have identified push orders as exceptions and started tracking them. When I asked them if there was any push order the previous day, they were dumbfounded. It seems their exception monitoring process tracked such push orders diligently every day, but these were reviewed only at the end of the month!
Exception monitoring is useful only if we track it on a continuous basis and act on it immediately. Else it is akin to the local fire station recording citizens’ calls diligently and acting on it only at the end of the month!