Some good advice here at Manufacturing.net from Tom Leonarski talking about things you can do to improve your supply chain.

I especially liked his comment that “Decision-making up and down the supply chain must be based on finding the best way to reach the business objective, even though this frequently means sub-optimizing one’s own function-specific metrics.”

Far too frequently it seems that departments have their metrics and they focus aggressively on achieving them. The problem, as noted above, is that a lot of the decisions that need to be made require tradeoffs and looking “beyond” just your departments objectives to see what makes the most sense for the business as a whole. This is not to suggest that people don’t care about what’s good for the business, but the reality is that people are frequently departmentally focused and their goals (and even compensation) are tied to those objectives – and that drives behavior.

Empowering peole to respond to change is critically important, but doing so in a way that ensures that they have visibility into the impact of their decisions on the entire business and are armed with the information needed to make the right decisions for the business as a whole is critical to driving the right outcomes.

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