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sinha.rk.dr@gmail.com
Is your Supply Chain slowing down in responding to market needs?
I have heard from many supply chain leaders that they have noticed a marked drop in responsiveness of their supply chain. Their teams are taking longer to respond to changes in market demand. Sounds familiar?
The supply chain teams attribute it to more frequent changes in demand patterns. While it is true that the demand is getting more dynamic and difficult to predict, there is another reason that is often overlooked. Let me ask you a question.
Have you noticed that your mobile slows down sometimes? It takes too long to open a page, the messages take longer to download and send… What do you do in such cases?
The most common response is to close down many screens which may be open at the same time! It’s a hack that works every time. The moment we shut the other screens, response becomes much faster.
What do we learn from this? Various open screens are akin to the multiple projects your supply chain team is currently working on. We must halt, postpone or kill many of the low priority projects, for the high priority ones to move faster.
In TOC parlance, it’s called ‘Stop Bad Multitasking’ and ‘WIP Control’.
If you haven’t tried it yet, go ahead and implement it as a guiding principle to get amazing results.