Away from the day to day noise of typical business process and transactional activity – raising purchase orders, booking in materials for example – its likely that there will be a number of projects, many targeted at improving performance and efficiency, taking place within the business.
Recognizing that supply chain can not only impact profitability but be a significant contributory factor to customer satisfaction there is usually a clamour to improve, providing both better service and increased financial contribution to the business
You may have many projects underway in the supply chain function at any point in time – Supplier rationalization, improved customer scheduled deliveries, commodity programs for example. Due consideration of how these are implemented from a methodology perspective can improve not only the possibility of success but also help with the communication of company goals and strategy.
The supply chain war room
A war room is a single space or meeting room within the business, used as a visual management centre, where you can assess both the performance of your function but monitor the progress of particular improvement work streams that may be underway.
KPI’s
The building block for your war room will be a continuously updated set of measures and metrics they will define performance and clearly indicate any gaps against desired targets. In many organizations these will typically be set against QCD objectives. Under performing KPI’s will then be targeted for project/workstream activity.
Worskstreams/Projects
KPI’s that underperform (for example supplier delivery) become the focus of an improvement work stream or project – The original KPI is taken and then drilled into for more detailed analysis (for example this might be in the form of a Pareto Analysis e.g. Worst delivering suppliers) to try to ascertain the route cause of the problem.
Each work stream will be given an owner or project manager and once a more detailed assessment has been carried out of the data– a resourced action plan is developed to describe what activity will be carried out to improve the situation. Key issues are recorded and further analysis produced as required.
More than just visual management
In this way rather than just be a place to put KPI’s the war room becomes the central meeting place to discuss departmental performance and improvement– for many this might be a daily “stand up” to review the actions of the day – for other organizations it might take the form of a weekly/monthly review. Attendees may be various stakeholders from executive decision makers through to operators / buyers – anyone who is able to influence performance.
The process is typically thus
1/ Review the top level metrics
2/ Allow each work stream owner to provide an update as to their project
3/ Consider which projects might need retiring (KPI’s are back to expected levels)
4/ Consider what new projects need initiating.
Regular focused reviews of departmental KPI’s not only draw the attention to corporate objectives but also help ingrain it into the organizations culture – using visual management in a recognized context can underpin this ethos – challenging everyone to play their part in routing out waste and inefficiency.
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