Process Improvement 101

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...

I’ve worked on many major projects and here are the best lessons learned. Don’t budget so many projects in the New Year that you can’t deliver them. I worked at one pharmaceutical company and there were a limited amount of projects driven by a Project Officer and designed to fit the team’s work throughout the year. One project focused on streamlining the SAP Planning and Procurement exception messages. This one project contributed to...

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...

The best way to improve a supply chain is by attacking it from the top to bottom.  That means from the C-suite down. What many companies do is allow users to make suggestions from the bottom without a proper ROI performed (with clear time and cost savings) and whether their suggestions are in line with the company’s medium to long term strategies. You end up with dozens if not hundreds of request for changes usually addressing a...