Articles
This is a reaction to a LinkedIn post that inquired about calculating the Takt Time for infrequently executed business processes, such as S&OP.
I’d say reducing lead time is more important for processes that happen infrequently. The way I see it, such a calculation represents a bottleneck that must be relieved ASAP to not disturb flow towards the customers. From the point of view of the customers, the S&OP calculations are the company’s means-to-an-end, and should be done in a way that minimally reduces delivered value / adds to cost.
An often-unexplored avenue is to improve the UX of the process for the company’s employees, and therefore reduce meaningless back-and-forth, manual errors, rework, and delays.
In such a project in the past, the finding was that the terrible UX imposed by SAP was one of the big factors increasing lead time unnecessarily.
For S&OP, it also helps to reduce the “throw it over the fence” thinking between those forecasting demand and those calculating how to fulfill it operationally.
As always, it helps to bring people to the same table and figure out how to make the end-to-end process better, instead of only locally faster for one department’s benefit. Interestingly, the choice of software is often to the primary benefit of the IT department. This is why, in the end, we pursued a custom web-based solution with collaboration from multiple sides before infraction with SAP was needed.
