Coalescing

My kids are so cute…they have been doodling on my iPad again 🙂

The second doodle is mine.  I got to it after thinking  about how inventory would be easy to visualise as a time series to see variation over days when comparing by months. I originally drew it turned by 90 degrees with the lines running up the page distinguishing day of the month from 1 to 28/30/31 then each line being a consecutive month.  Then I thought it was a shame that we didn’t have this data for inventory historically where we are now at a daily level as we could then see more detailed variation.  Then I thought about how the work Im doing needs to stay on the rails and how the consultants we are working with havent worked with sap before – you can tell.  I then smiled and thought how Christina would eat this for breakfast.  I thought his interesting it might be to see this simply as filtered lines based on movement types.  Then I thought it would be interesting to keep the circle idea and have them size by value or volume and colour the lines by either movement type or product type/attribute. Then I criticised my self for wanting to be the one to drive the visualisations instead of expressing the requirement: identification (see), understand and systematically reduce variation using defined method(s) (manage).  I hen was reminded that this is an organisational journey as I’ve been told that people don’t have skills (that’s what I bring) so we need to teach them ways to challenge and act on data. We need an organisation that can critically identify opportunities for reduction in variation (remember alternatives are crossing the streams and joining them too to reduce variation).  I then thought about how every bodies picture would be different and I bumped again into learning styles and wondering what knowledge already exists to help us find the way to coalesce the most helpful visualisations for all.  I want the analyst to have unlimited potential.  I need them to back door access that data with desktop.  I want them to have workshops with experts in the tool and I don’t think our current partner are it but they’ll do for now.  I thought about Consider the trial basis to prove to Barry the worth of his people.  I thought about Figure out the possible ways of getting virtual creativity come to life.  I remembers that I really want to create and use the strategy and tactic tree for supply chain analytics.  I’m amazed at how many thoughts stream out as I haven’t captured all of them and this triggered off one picture too !  But it s all good food for thought.  Then I realised that we have to see reason.  We can be agile but we can’t be divergent at this stage at the risk of delivering to time, unless our boss on this one wants the timelines to slip. I’m observing slippage as a direct result of people’s thinking being diverted in other directions than the converging path that we are now on.  We also have another project that has to be delivered and already has significant investment contained within it our requirements up until this time.  We also must contain the manual feeds as it drives risks I calculated risk on Hyperion.  It is a one feed that is monthly.  We are just on the cusp of blame storming and diverting energy into a blame game.  Which is good for nobody in the room for many obvious reasons.  The scope has been changing and if the time is the bounding factor and overspend is not an option them we hold scope tightly and deliver that first.  If ark can’t give us clear requirements at this stage then we have to rethink based on how much resource hours we have burnt to date and how much we have left to burn.  Also I need to remind ark that we have no costs based on return storage as the quoted storage was small.  

a colleague once gave me a story of change.  He needed a site to fundamentally change from a site unconcerned by scrap and service to one that could predict output with great certainty and with minimum waste.

He recounted that after a year nothing really changed.  Then he said they realised something that they coined the PICNIC effect wasn’t happening.  If change was going to happen then the forces for change needed to line up to make it a picnic. 

 So the positive aspects of the change needed to go from positive and uncertain and in the future 

“So The organisation will make more profit with this change, but for me how likely am I to see any increase in my bonus by the end of the year? )

And the negative aspects need to go from negative and uncertain and in the future

“So why should I bother risking my job improving things here – we’ve been doing it this way years and anyhow with my experience I’m indispensable so I wouldn’t be the first to go”

To positive immediate and certain as well as negative immediate and certain

“So every month we are going to be rewarded for savings we’ve created; my job description now includes a contribution to improvements.  If I don’t provide ideas and support them to completion then I’ll be underperforming and ultimately lose my job if I can’t change”

And so an initiative that had stymied for two years turned around in 6 months.  The site went on not only to outperform other sites but became a site that was known for coming up with great ideas that other sites used to improve their profits.  A few people were problematic, but once the rewards started to flow peer pressure on non-contributors became dos sustsained that they began to leave.

And it made me think why smoking is so hard to quit from – the forces for are positive immediate and certain (aaaaah I remember the lovely feeling from the nicotine) with the forces against being negative uncertain and in the future (sure it may kill me one day, but I’ll stop way before then).  

So if you line up the forces of change you’ll have a picnic 🙂

Coming from an FMCG supply chain upbringing the bureaucracy and waste is absurd in the the part of healthcare I am currently in.

Its surreal.  Going through the motions again and again.  Re-visiting the new issues stemming from the same source.  

One of my team, rather wryly said – watch Brazil – so I did.  I have never laughed so hard or quite felt such familiarity in such bizarre working practices as I do now.

I see Leaders with too much invested in the too near future; without enough knowledge of their system to do a great job at making sure that we don’t expose ourselves to the same mistakes over and over again.

I feel They haven’t got the measure of the place.  They definitely have clarity on the one measure that is important to our stakeholders.  The fact that I see the behaviour to achieve the objective as marginally tending to lacking in integrity is somewhat disconcerting at times. 

I need to give the leaders credit – they have come a long way from the SKU availability of 85% in the portfolio that they had within the last two years.  Interestingly though I suspect that some of those problems stem from some of the behaviors that I see now.  So how do we get our leaders out of our short term futures and back to the long term futures where their noses and their managers noses should be at?

Measures and Metrics.  (I’m always struggling to remember the difference between these two so hang on a minute while I check a nice easy online example).  So remembering that a measure is something that I can measure and that a metric is something I calculate from more than one measure I am back on the road.

So the way we get our leaders off our backs is to give them good data that support good measures that in turn support good metrics.  Easy right?  Well it has been an interesting journey so far.  I’ll not list the obstacles of different SAP instances; different forecasting instances and a decided difference in master data structure between all three systems.   I long for the annoying but incredibly liberating and powerful discipline that good master data governance produces.

So working with an incredibly talented PHD student on loan from Bangor Labs, we are building new insights for the business.  We have created a new set of data pulling together different systems and are just beginning to visualize the rich and complex supply chain and manufacturing process that is biological manufacture of immuno-assays.

Isn’t it obvious? You can’t do new stuff if you have a veritable plate of spaghetti procedures lined with trip wire and grenades. You just don’t know what button you might accidentally push or wallpaper over that could cause a problem.

And more obviously if your procedrual documentation is so interlinked (like really well intermeshed chain mail) then one procedural failure will find itself radiating out through the other procedures until something fails – generally the poor sucker inside the chain mail – who (you guessed it) gets landed with a corrective action – which in a highly regulated, risk adverse organisation with low exposure to process design methodology ends up with the most common action – (you guessed it!) add another reviewing step into the procedure or even add another procedure.  And so another link in the chain mail s created. 

Finally my last rant on this one – do you know the other side effect I find soul destroying with this type of procedural documentation?  The reading.  Do you know that I read more words than a PhD student does in his lit review every month?   And most of the time it is a procedure I have read in the last few weeks and I have no idea what has changed in it since the last time I read it.  Crazy!  

So what would I do to fix this one?  

Strategy:  return time to the organisation from reading procedural updates by moving to rapidly updateble machine based procedures and reducing release frequency of procedural updates.

• Necessity assumption:  in a manufacturing organisation where people are the mixers, makers and testers of products (I.e. More touch time directly equals more productivity) time spent returning to office based PCs and time spent re-reading entire documents for unknown changes is waste.
• Tactic: Count the words read in the organisation every day and aim to reduce by half.   Do this by introducing video footage and machine side training screens (or go low cost and grab the retired iPhones)  for machine based procedures and move to controlled releases of procedural updates with full version history.  
• Parallel assumption:  
• Sufficiency assumption:  Without a financial cost model applied to reading speed this objective will suffer from inertia by finance.  The cost model needs to factor time saved by management with a far greater value (decision making time) than paid. Based on the knowledge that any systems greatest constraint is always management attention.  
• If the organisation confesses to not fully reading procedural updates then that is another problem entirely.

And

1. Strategy:  prevent new processes from suffering from defects by building all new processes with defect free thinking.  
2. Necessity:  in an organisation where failure to follow procedure can have significant and long term negative effects the ability to identify record and prevent defects before the failure occurs is required.  
3. Tactic:  Move the organisation from procedural thinking to process thinking.  Do this by ensuring each new process uses DMADV or other such design based Six Sigma tools and build a world where defects in processes can be defined and measured without fear of consequence.

we have a big visitor coming to site in three weeks.  Need to show him the journey that we have been on and where we are going to go from here on in.  

But more importantly I want to reflect upon the journey I’ve been recently.  Can I do it?  Of course I can!  Start with the most recent thought (but what if I get too detailed in just one?) draw a line, put positive experiences above it and challenges negatives and learnings below it.  

Peice of paper needed:)

A vision – hope. It’ll take time. A fair wind. Belief. There will be some backward steps. And figuring out a way forward. There are good folk. Take care.
It’s okay to rant – and release!

What are we doing here. What are we going to change by having this meeting. How quickly will we change it. What did we need in order to have this meeting.

Meetings. Urgh.

I wrote a note to myself

Visibility of flow = on boarding support quicker and easier and less chance of rework.

Job done. :). Albeit with probably a slight pause 🙂  I got visual analytics started instead of grinding through excel.  chose tableau to get started straight away on business insights and will use klikview for future dashboards.  Still working with dispersed data sets and will do for years until the master data governance becomes stronger in my part of the organisation.

It runs the same. With black dots.
Over and over again.
At component. Whatever creates the closest block.
Maybe you’ll see a unique amount in progress.
  

Starting to see the real me.
Cool.
Next find out how to communicate the brief.
Maybe questions would be good.
Imagine it was your group.
Where would you take them?

Variance is a problem. Quite a serious one.  But no sleep time issues from this one.