Operational Excellence

The nerds are taking over the world! In case you haven’t noticed the IT nerds are talking over the world. Marc Zuckerberg is the youngest billionaire on the planet, Bill Gates has been one the richest people in the world for as long as I can remember. More and more App creators are running billion dollar companies.  IT is now embedded in not only our lives but everything a corporation does from running business processes, developing...

“Move a thousand people forward a foot at a time, rather than moving one person forward by a thousand feet” In 2007, when JetBlue left hundreds of passengers stranded on nine planes for over ten hours during an ice storm, they knew they had to make colossal business changes. They made those changes by taking a day to map out their bad weather operations on Post-It notes, identifying one thousand pain points. That’s right… One...

Gartner votes Apple as the top supply chain for 2013. Steve Jobs and Tim Cook both oversaw Apples Supply Chain. “When Cook took over the supply chain, he cut the number of component suppliers from 100 to 24, in a move to force the companies to compete for Apple’s business. Cook then shut down 10 of the 19 company warehouses to limit overstocking, and by September 1998 inventory was down from a month to only six days” Your...

If you want to stand out, don’t be different. Be outstanding. – Meredith West In my last article I wrote about tough lessons learned while attaining World Class S&OP (Sales and Operations) certification. The most comments I received pertained to “It’s the people and their decisions that will make a project hell” It’s beneficial if you go back and read the article before going on. How DO we take a politically saturated, finger...

I spoke at two major Logistics and Supply Chain Conferences about a major business transformation project I was involved in. It’s time to take a hard look at the successes, challenges and failures. The object of the project was to reach a World Class level for Sales and Operations in the company through the Oliver Wight method. According to Wikipedia S&OP planning was developed by Oliver Wight in the 1980’s. So they know their...

Gather the company business experts together to expose business and SAP priorities. Those priorities should be closely linked to what your customers want. Unlike Six Sigma projects, SAP tools can be a total game changer for certain areas of the company. Tools like electronic batch management or quality notifications can bring huge efficiencies if integrated well with your current SAP modules. Educating the user community prior...