2014-Mar: Operational Excellence by Design eNewsletter

CHAIRMAN’S PERSPECTIVES 

Operational Excellence – Lessons Learned from Golf

It’s March – finally.  The Winter darkness has noticeably given way to longer hours of daylight.  The cold and the snows are abating.  The crocuses and early spring flowers are in bloom.  It’s a pleasure to waken to the birds chirping.  And a person can feel that Spring is just around the corner.

That is, except in Upstate New York, where March doesn’t come until May (especially this year).

And while my wife is thinking of “Spring Cleaning”, I am thinking of Fishing and Golf.

Germany is a very peculiar place in many regards. But probably the most striking peculiarity is their absolute insistence on “ordnung muss sein” (roughly translated to “there must be order“). In Germany, there is a process and a procedure for everything – and everything has a place and you better be certain to ensure it is in that place at all times.

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OPERATIONAL EXCELLENCE

Want Change to Succeed? How to Improve Your Chances

By Bill Hodges

Why is it that so often the expected level of performance improvement from a process or system change is not fully achieved? Is this because the change manager fails to fully understand the interaction between the individual, the current process and the established organization?

It is essential that the change manager fully understands how the individuals and the team interact with the current process.  It is equally important that the individuals understand that the current methods are not producing success. When the short comings of the current state have been established and accepted then a business is ready to start the journey from the current state to a successful future state.

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Are you High Mix & Low Volume? Do you have poor forecasts? PA can still help…with a few tweaks!

By Paul Moraes and Whitney Sagan

The authors were faced with a mounting problem:  Sales forecasts were continuing to deteriorate and Corporate was mandating a traditional application of Sales & Operational Planning (S&OP).   This application relied on forecasts and static data.  Static data is sufficient where forecasts and run-rates are consistent, though that is simply not the case in the Business Unit the authors currently reside.

Working with short product life cycles and high demand volatility, clean static data alone will not produce an effective S&OP. Thus the authors began experimenting with a number of analysis tools to assist with improving the S&OP input. The mission was to find a stable way to bias the data so that random variability could be kept in check while allowing our recent history to point us in the right direction. It was our experience that through the use of predictive analytics to feed our S&OP, we arrived at a far more effective plan for operations management.

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TRUST ME – I’M AN ENGINEER 

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PROFESSIONAL ORGANIZATIONS

Featured Events

We look forward to seeing in Montreal for the largest Industrial and Systems Engineering event of the year! XONITEK’s Joseph Paris will be speaking as well as sitting on the panel for the Process Industries Division.

Operational Excellence Society

Click to view March Meetings

OpEx Discussion

XONITEK
In the News 

Thought Food

The Wolves of the Web

A World of Robber-Barons

Minimum Wage Increase in US will Probably Promote Spending

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