How to improve product availability?
Tip 1: Identify your urgent Vs important availability issues
We all know that supply chain decisions ripple across the entire organisation. Unresolved supply chain issues behave similarly. However, some issues will always be far more important than others. It’s our job to identify these tasks and fix them as best we can.
Firstly, all tasks can be broken down into two main categories:
Important – these are tasks which directly help us achieve specific goals.
Urgent – These are tasks that require attention. However, these tasks are often associated with helping someone else achieve their goals.
What do these tasks look like in our world?
In the context of the supply chain, an example of an ‘important’ task could be to review forecast exceptions. This is important because this task helps us to make better decisions around inventory. As a result, this task helps us to achieve our goals of securing product availability or minimising supply chain cost.
An example of an ‘Urgent’ task could be placing a last-minute air-freight order to fulfil a salesperson’s promise to a customer. This may not directly impact your team’s objective. However, the impact of not doing this is immediate- E.g., if you do not order the stock, the sale will be lost.
Often the supply chain team is inundated with ‘Urgent’ issues. Yet at the same time, the normal day to day important tasks still have to be completed. It doesn’t take much for your hardworking team to become overwhelmed!
Now let me ask the burning question: Which of these two above examples would you do first?
Now imagine that you only have time to do one of these two tasks- which one do you ignore?