I’m rather a fan of a certain type of reality TV show. Not the ‘I’m a Celebrity get me out of here’ fare nor the ‘Big Brother’ style. To me these are as divorced from reality as Paul McCartney is from Heather Mills and a good chunk of his hard earned money.
No, I like to sit and enjoy the ones where ‘ordinary’ people attempt to achieve something other than fame itself. My particular favourite is ‘The Restaurant’ where aspiring couples are challenged to run a dining establishment and undertake a number of culinary challenges that will earn them the right to eventually open a restaurant with the backing of Raymond Blanc.
However, I am having some little trouble with the current series as the starting line up certainly had a peculiar collection of obvious first timers, clear no hopers, and some people who had quite clearly never dined in a restaurant - never mind understood the challenges of running one.
I am sure that out of all the applicants that may have applied a preference has been made, in selecting the couples for the show, for the comically unsuitable due cooking ability and the entertainingly hopeless in terms of understanding of customer service.
I know who is going to win already and I’ve popped down to the bookies to place my £10 bet based on them being the only couple that have A) A chef that can cook and B) A front of house person that isn’t rude, or hopeless, in front of the customers.
So why am I writing about this here?
Well, I regularly become involved ERP, CRM and business systems implementations and quite frequently see individuals selected for the project who clearly have no understanding of what they need to do during the project or have a seriously challenging personality that will damage the credibility of the project or even lead to failure.
There is no doubt in my mind that the couples selected for the TV series certainly took the places of people who were far more competent – this would be for the entertainment value. There is nothing quite like watching, in car crash style slow-motion, disasters unfolding as a restaurant serves dreadful food in a Fawlty Towers style.
On an implementation project as serious as ERP there can be no room for anyone but the best. A little while ago I wrote a paper ‘Simply the Best (ERP Project Team Members)’ that discusses the types of personality, and the reasons, for not selecting people to your team. Believe me all this is drawn from first- hand experience.
Unless you are deliberately setting put to have a disastrous, but gripping, ERP project I’d take a read...
Above the planning board in the sales office of one of our customers is a sign that says ‘Failing to Plan is Planning to Fail’. Although we do come across a few customers, when undertaking our business process reengineering projects, that don’t plan at all, it is the rare exception. The truth is that there are a number of business that believe that they plan well but make it hard work for themselves by not utilising properly the business systems that they have – but there are a few that have too much planning going on. To see what I mean by this take a look at my whitepaper ‘Too much planning hurts your business’ at our free downloads website section.
The most common issue we find is customers who have implemented ERP but then, over time, begin to ignore what it is telling them. Rather than address the issues that are making the output from MRP ‘wrong’ they spend a great deal of time, effort and sometimes money on producing reports or developing stupendous spreadsheets that will give them the data they need to plan correctly (but it doesn’t).
During our BPR and ERP optimisation projects we spend time with each department and discuss the challenges they are facing. Regularly we sit down with purchasing and we meet a harassed purchasing manager and frazzled purchasing clerks who are at their wits end because they simply do not have enough time in their days to handle the workload. What do we hear? It’s often these expressions;
‘The output from MRP is wrong...’
‘We have had to develop our own reports to ignore the bad output...’
‘We download the MRP output to Excel and then manipulate it to come up with some sort of reasonable purchasing plan...’
‘If we bought in everything MRP was suggesting we’d need five more warehouses!’
‘Although we have got too much inventory it’s never the right stuff...’ etc
I’ve yet to come across an ERP systems’ MRP programme that doesn’t basically work in the same way – looks at all demand and then produces suggestions that can then be confirmed into purchase orders. It will also make suggestions for orders to be cancelled, brought forward, moved back, increased or decreased. OK, some MRP can be quite crude and simply aggregate all demand whereas others can have sophisticated order pegging that allows you to see where the demand is coming from. But overall, they do pretty much the same thing. At the end of the day it’s nothing more than a calculation.
What has often happened is that there has been a lack of housekeeping on the ERP and there are backorders that have been ignored, or production orders with back-flushed items have not been completed, receipts of goods inwards have not been carried out in a timely fashion – amongst a number of other things.
We also find that blanket policies may have been put in place – for instance all lead times on all items set at a standard number of weeks. Sometimes we see safety time added to every item from every supplier.
In these situations it is absolutely obvious why the output from MRP is as it is – the data that all the calculations are based on is garbage.... and if it’s garbage in it is highly unlikely that anything sensible will come out.
Rather than address the underlying issues with the data people begin to develop their own suite of reports – these will try to ignore some of the output as it is known that this is ‘wrong’. Sometimes people will have all the MRP output shipped out to a spreadsheet where highly developed macros and code will mash the data and make it ‘sensible’.
Sadly, it doesn’t. What really happens is that things turn up too late, some turn up too early and some don’t appear at all. Production and warehousing start beating up purchasing and purchasing respond by employing more people. Soon there is a whole department focussed on expediting orders rather than negotiating deals and forming long term relationships with suppliers.
The reality is that the best way to address the issues is to get in there and tidy up all the data – make it sensible in terms of lead times etc and educate the other departments about the need to housekeep their data too.
On a few occasions we have helped customers get a few more years out of their existing ERP system rather than move or upgrade to a new one by helping them ‘sort out’ MRP.
So if you have a purchasing department that has a larger than expected headcount yet they can’t seem to get the suppliers to deliver on time then ask them what they are using to plan....
Neighborhood
Explore friends, family, friends & family, or entire neighborhood.
