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What’s really holding you back on your Agile journey?
Let’s admit that you will face a few obstacles in your Agile journey. Many of these obstacles are small and appear after you have started the journey. However, in my opinion, there is a big obstacle that results in significant inertia to start the journey itself. Let’s decode it in today’s post.
How do you view the gaps in your supply chain performance, compared to your ambitions? There are stockouts, obsolete inventory, stale inventory, pileups. What’s the reason for these symptoms? That’s the most important question.
Many teams externalise the cause of these symptoms. We are stocked out because the demand is much higher than our forecast. We have stale and obsolete inventory since the demand has gone down due to competitor’s actions. We are delayed in servicing customer orders because some other customer has already picked up the available inventory.
These are all external causes. If we think these are the reasons, we are likely to maintain the current state and experience these symptoms again and again. Is there a way out?
We can actually reframe the causes to make them internal. We are stocked out because we didn’t read the demand shift in time. We have obsolete stocks because our production schedules are rigid and frozen, and batch sizes are large. We have inventory pileups in wrong places because we were too late to respond to demand shifts.
Once we reframe the causes, our Agile journey really starts. We now have a set of levers and actions to correct these root causes. We can read the demand signals faster. We can respond faster to changes in demand. We can be more flexible in our inventory deployment, production schedule and input material deliveries.
Agility starts with a mindset that internalises the root cause and finds sustainable solutions.