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Is your Supply Chain team overwhelmed with day-to-day firefighting?
It’s a common feedback I get from many supply chain leaders. Their team seems to be busy firefighting everyday… talking to transporters for faster delivery of critical consignments, talking to warehouses to unload materials to avoid truck detention, requesting factories to advance certain production runs to prevent stockouts, calling suppliers to expedite delivery of critical input materials… Sounds familiar?
How do we get out of this vicious cycle?
Further investigation reveals that these teams spend all their time on just putting off the fires. Hardly any time is spent on identifying the root cause of the fire and preventing its future occurrence.
Companies which have solved this issue have instituted the process of documenting corrective and preventive action for every such occurrence. It’s popularly known as CAPA (Corrective And Preventive Action).
CAPA is still an interim measure. It is reactive in nature, triggered by occurrence of fires. While it does help in bringing down the number of fires, it fails to eliminate them. Certain root causes are left unaddressed, if these haven’t caused a fire yet…
CAPA must be complemented by Potential Problem Analysis, which looks at the potential occurrences of fire and what their root cause could be. We must eliminate these root causes as well.