Trouble in The Office

Another One Bites the Dust

Two weeks ago, Sheila the demand planner turned in her resignation letter to join the Great Unknown. Actually, the Great Unknown offered her just about the same pay as the Office currently gives her, but with some added benefits, like a funkier title – Planning Manager, and opportunities to travel around Asia since her new stock keeping units[1] would comprise of chemicals that criss-cross the region.

She had been talking about this for months – moving out of the Office and getting better employment somewhere else. In Sheila’s mind, what qualifies for better employment wasn’t higher salary or a company car, but an obsessive-compulsive friendly system that connects nerve endings from your brain to the rest of the operational elements (like delivery service or production). Don’t we all want that? You only have to will it and it would be done. The Great Unknown seemed to promise Sheila the technology, and that meant, aside from other perks, less time at work and more time with her family.

My experience with technology is that it doesn’t, it NEVER, helps you ease your choking workload. Workload, I realized, is a function of Personnel Management and Business Direction, not Technology. Take the case of our Supply Chain (SC) department. Eight years ago we implemented what was considered a breakthrough supply chain management system. Because the department came from manually taking down orders, typing it into the MS Office applications, printing and then carrying out onto the shop floor, the New Technology which committed to automate those non-value adding work (like walking from point A to point B) looked like THE solution to their non-existent social lives.

And for a while, it did. It automated everything the SC specialists took hours to do. Since stock distribution became more “efficient,” the managers thought of other ridiculous things for specialists to waste time on, like generate reports of the same data in five different formats that nobody reads. However, as a result of aggressive global strategy, the number of customer branches grew (really, no secret; one of Sales Department’s key strategies to increase customer access), number of new SKUs increased (Marketing’s tactic), and the target customer service level, as a result of the enabler, was raised.

Did putting in the New Technology translate into an increased efficiency for the SC specialists?

Ha-an. Dili. No.

The specialists were, and still are, working overtime at the distribution department because of 1) the increased channels or customer branches whose parameters could only be established in six months, 2) slave-driving manager who couldn’t say No (it’s a mutation; see related blog). We still have stock-outs, probably in the same ratio as we did eight years ago, if you consider that we had fewer outlets and products then than now. The department hired even more SC Specialists and assistants to take on the load; it was more than the department could initially handle. Last thing I heard, the specialists and its manager were putting in 14 to 15-hour days because the GM was asking for daily stock situation reports from them. (I hate micro-managing...)

It’s an operational practice never to work a machine at its full capacity to prevent breakdown (ideally, it should be around 80%). If that’s a practice for machines, people should be taken care of no less than that.

I just hope Sheila gets what she wants in the Great Unknown with her technology wish list. If not that, well at least she gets to travel.


[1]Abbreviated as SKU in supply chain jargon

posted by Elyss @ 10:30 AM