Email
sinha.rk.dr@gmail.com
How should you prioritise the Supply Chain improvement initiatives?
Most supply chain teams work on continuous improvement of their operations. However, the way these improvements are identified varies a lot across companies. Some use benchmarking to identify the gaps on key parameters, some use the bridge between current and targeted cost, some others use customer pain points to drive improvements.
One thing is, however, common in all these approaches. All are based on treating the symptoms! Since supply chains have a lot of internal dependencies, treating one symptom may actually aggravate the other one. As a result, improvements done by various teams don’t add up to the overall company performance improvement. What’s the way out?
In my view, we should stop working on symptomatic local improvements and instead work on identifying their root cause. You may be surprised that the root cause for hundreds of symptoms may be only two or three!
If we improve or eliminate the underlying root causes, the impact is multi-fold and visible in terms of a substantial jump on several key parameters simultaneously.
All our improvements should, therefore, be directed towards these root causes. TOC provides a good framework to identify and improve these leverage points.