Short Term: As a manufacture, what can be done now?
Leadership.
Establish a triage team to manage the crisis.
Be proactive.
Don’t waste the opportunity: A Crisis or Recession is a Terrible thing to Waste.
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MultiBriefs Exclusive – Gail Short In the weeks after COVID-19 began sweeping across the United States, the pandemic succeeded in revealing chinks in the country’s retail and manufacturing supply chains. Some supply chains simply broke. Stores quickly sold out of items like hand sanitizer, antibacterial wipes, toilet paper and paper towels, to the frustration of …
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In the last couple of months, we have gone to grocery stores and pharmacies only to find empty shelves where the toilet paper, paper towels, antibiotics, cleaning supplies and hand sanitizer used to be.
Let’s take a moment to discuss supply chain as it applies to the retail industry. For non-perishable goods, canned foods and dry-goods, the only use of JIT in the retail sector is from the distribution center to the store location. From manufacturing to distribution centers, is traditional “push”, manufacturing utilizing highly sophisticated forecasting / demand planning, or just-in-case inventories. When digging deeper into the outages occurring today, the demand variability of these items is extremely low; meaning their demand is highly predictable. What we are experiencing is a once in a 100-year event! No demand planning / forecasting system is capable of predicting this type of event or crisis. If demand planning processes were able to forecast this event, I guarantee that this kind of knowledge would not be wasted on toilet paper and paper towels! Someone would be using that information to make billions in the stock market or to accurately predict weather patterns. Additionally, push systems are not flexible, responsive or agile enough to quickly pivot for sudden demand changes.
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Art Koch’s Profit Chain® Series
Volume 3 | Number 4 | April 2020
Can you imagine the United States outsourcing 80-85% of our defense contracts to the lowest bidder?
And if we were to do this, would we be putting our national security and sovereignty in great jeopardy? Absolutely! This is exactly what the health care industry has done to the US!
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Most of my advisory work involves helping outline, reviewing or critiquing project plans, of one sort or another.
I routinely nudge or push the team to go faster, to be quicker, and to “Fail Fast…Learn Fast…Fix Fast…!
Too often people seek Perfection in what they do, and it is NOT attainable. This pursuit delays fixing critical processes that will increase customer loyalty, corporate culture and profits.
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As the reality and the shock of the Covid-19 crisis are starting to settle, business leaders and owners should be taking immediate action to protect business today and secondly mobilize their entrepreneurial skills to seize opportunities as they arise.
This global pandemic is already having a profound impact on small- and medium-sized businesses, but now is the time to prepare strategies for recovery. Listen to this podcast produced by Dan Weedin in Seattle where he interviews business experts from Seattle, Portland, Miami, Canada, and Australia on what business owners should be thinking about during the Covid-19 crisis. Recorded March 18, 2020.
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The Shrimp Tank | Seattle Episode 86 – COVID-19 Expert Panel
We find ourselves in interesting times. Unprecedented times with a global pandemic that is severely impacting both individuals and businesses; especially small and medium-sized businesses.
Being in Seattle, we have been at the epicenter of the outbreak in the United States. To that end, we are practicing responsible social distancing and not holding a live podcast and have rescheduled our guest to another time in the future. Co-host Dan Weedin has recorded a special podcast related directly to responding to the COVID-19 crisis. Dan has recorded an interview with four global experts and colleagues of his to help you figure out what to do right now and this week to respond and set up recovery strategies.
Listen to the podcast.
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Art Koch’s Profit Chain® Series
Volume 3 | Number 3 | March 2020
The Call of a Generation – Navigating the Covid-19 Crisis
As our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents before us, each generation was called on to make sacrifices for their country: whether it was during World Wars, The Great Depression, or similar pandemics such as the Spanish Flu. Today, WE are the generation who must make the sacrifices. We will get through this as stronger people, stronger nations and partnerships. Please remember, as bad as this feels, no one is dropping bombs on us or shooting at us!
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Entropy Busters® Series
Volume 3 | Number 2 | February 2020
I started with, “Let’s start with the realization that plan “A” to relocate operations to China had a major flaw. If you moved manufacturing to China, India or any other low-cost producing country with the intention of importing goods back to North America or Europe (half a world away), then your plan was unsound!” The primary focus was on inventory velocity, total cost of ownership and the ethics of investing. Now we are in the middle of a S^&% storm of COVID-19 with world-wide impact to supply chains and the global economy.
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How are your teams at? Forming Norming Storming Performing How well your teams move through these steps will determine their impact, performance and conflict levels. https://youtu.be/XAQC_Am5ywU
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