You can’t plan your compromises
You’re most important customer is on the phone wanting to drop in an order and wants to know if you can meet their needs - what they want, where they want it and when they want it. You know that if you don’t, they can and will go elsewhere since your competitors are a click away.
What do you do?
If you’re like most brand owners and manufacturers, you kick into “response mode.” The customer service rep that took the call needs to talk this over with the planners, buyers, contract manufacturers and others throughout the supply network that can answer the burning questions to respond quickly and accurately. To do this, all of these people need to have instant access to the right information pertinent to their areas of expertise, they need to be able to collaborate with other key stakeholders and they need to be able to figure out what their options are and what impact any of those options would have on the rest of the business.
These deviations from plan are happening literally hundreds of times throughout the day in most organizations. It may be a key customer calling, a field failure that needs to be dealt with, an unexpected delay in receipt of a critical part of any number of things that “just come up.”
At the core to solving these problems is compromosing. Teams need to get together and figure out what tradeoffs and compromises need to be made on the spot to solve these types of problems….and they need to do so while weighing the impact on the rest of the business.
Some have thought that ERP or traditional supply chain planning applications may be the answer to these increasingly common occurences. Many have tried and failed at this approach since these systems lack real-time, holistic views of information, don’t support broad user adoption and collaboration, do not provide for rapid and simultaneous simulations, etc. ERP and traditional supply chain planning applications are good at what they were designed for - building a longer-term plan and executing it well. In essence, they were designed to run the business like clockwork.
When it comes to dealing with the business when it doesn’t run like clockwork, new solutions are required. You can’t plan your compromises, so you need to empower your people to respond effectively to change and determine their compromises “in the heat of the battle.”
June 30th, 2006 at 5:26 pm
Randy,
Thanks for your comments at my blog - they were instructive. As I delve deeper into your blog, I believe that I will obtain a better understanding of Response Management and its attendant characteristics.
In your comments, you have referred to “breakthrough” in responsiveness that can be achieved by empowering the many stakeholders involved in making course corrections due to unexpected events in the day. From my reading of Response Management (albeit a cursory one at this time), it seems to be a software backed tactical level planning, weigh the options and impacts, decision making (and probably prioritizing) system i.e. consisting of a DSS (Decision Support System) side as well as certain processes that use this DSS. This probably fills a gap that has existed with Supply Chain Planning tools (that remain at a more strategic and long term horizon level) in that they cannot really get down to the nitty gritty of operations. ERP tools have recorded information at all levels of the firm but they do little more than that. I hope that I have captured the gist of the Response Management approach.
Of course, any tool that does some if not all of the above piques my interest greatly.
What QRM does is something quite similar in that it also gets down into the nitty gritty of operations - however it is very much from the planning point of view. With its attendant DSS, QRM plans the structure of the manufacturing system for those very situations wherein Response Management has been highlighted above.
So in a sense, they’re competing ways to solve the tactical issues of daily operations at a level not addressed effectively by SCM/Simulation/ERP systems.
Is there a particular field of optimization/DSS/heuristics upon which Response Management is based? For QRM, it is applied Queuing theory - Queuing Networks to be precise.
I have cross posted this comment on my site.
Thanks again for your comments and I look forward to reading more about Response Management.
Chris
July 5th, 2006 at 8:56 am
Chris -
You clearly have achieved an impressive rapid’ understanding of Response Management, and roughly what RapidResponse does.
RapidResponse, our Response Management solution, is leveraging a unique Theory of Constraints (TOC) implementation, and other manufacturing centric algorithms that are heuristic in nature. It also structures the details governing operations as they are defined in ERP (BOM’s, master data, WIP, inter-site relationships, flexibility terms, outsourcing, etc).
Unlike DSS offerings, RapidResponse leverages the very algorithms used to govern the actions of operations to pre-determine an outcome based on a particular course correction. RapidResponse has no limit to the number of action alternatives a person can “try