Are You Overburdening Workers and Introducing Risk?
Load additional work onto your already overloaded Supply Chain Professionals?
Five months into the COVID-19 pandemic I’d had countless conversations with supply chain executives across the globe discussing how they were pivoting operations to deal with the impact. It was clear that due to unavoidable resource reductions, most or all supply chain professionals were being overloaded with additional responsibilities.
People find a way to cope with too much work!
Now, any human with more work than they can manage will most certainly figure out a way to rationalize the work to manageable proportions. A process of prioritization will naturally kick in and they walk through each responsibility and ask themselves things like:
What are the top things I MUST do to ensure my position or business is not compromised?
What are my boss's top priorities for me?
What shortcuts can I take, that won’t be noticeable, to lessen the workload on some items?
What tasks can I cut out completely that likely won't be obvious to anyone?
Does Deprioritized Work Introduce Risk?
I believe the last two items on the list should be very concerning to all leaders in any organization. Why? Because what's frightening is there can be substantial negative business impact associated with taking shortcuts and by sweeping things under the rug! Let me give you just one example based on my discussions with supply chain executives throughout 2020: Inventory Optimization could easily fall into the last two categories on a supply chain planners work priority list. How? Easy! one simple thing to do is raise inventory levels slightly above what is needed to meet demand. This results in much less work associated with day-to-day inventory management for the planner, or more simply put – by raising the water level in the lake, the captain of the boat doesn’t have to worry as much about hitting rocks under the surface. However, for all you supply chain leaders and financial managers out there, would this concern you at all? Why? Oh, you don't like additional cash tied up in excess inventory? Hmm!
It's a Necessary Evil!
I understand executives reading this are likely saying to themselves - I agree, but isn't making these types of decisions a necessary evil given the business conditions we are forced to deal with? Aren’t the negative outcomes unavoidable? Well, that's exactly what I asked myself during June of 2020. More specifically, I questioned whether our company, Right Sized Inventory (RSI), could help businesses resolve some of these unavoidable negative outcomes. I thought to myself, since RSI is in the business of providing inventory optimization software, there must be a way we can help in the area of Inventory Management!
Don't Bring Me a Problem Without a Recommendation!
After pondering what RSI could offer businesses to relieve some of this unplanned pain, I realized since all our team members work day-in and day-out within our patented inventory optimization software, we could more efficiently perform the inventory optimization simulations for clients at a fraction of their cost. That's exactly what we did!
Can you have your cake and eat it too? Sometimes you can!
In July of 2020, the RSI team rolled out a new service called Inventory-Optimization-as-a-Services (IOaas) where our team collects input data of inventory items from the client, runs the optimization simulations, and presents the results back to the client. Since July this new IOaaS offering has been devoured by the market. I am personally pleased RSI is now able to streamline some of the workload for supply chain professionals around the globe, while at the same time introduce better technology that yields better results. Thus, making it unnecessary for any planner to introduce excess inventory because there’s too much work on their plate!
