One of things we learned from this week’s lecture was “Correlational Design” This is the process by which we find out the factor that affect directly to another factor we want to improve or increase in the company or certain society. And after then we have to find out the third factor which affect most previous both two factors. For example, if you find out job satisfaction among employees directly affect their performance, it is important to find out how to increase employees’ job satisfaction rates and we have to understand that there is no absolute, almighty and always right answers to this question but we have to find out our own after considering the environment and tool and knowledge we can use
Companies always have a target to achieve and problems to solve. We have profit target, revenue, development schedule and sales volume to achieve and we also have problems to solve like delay in delivery, incorrect forecast, Overhead Cost and weak efficiency. We all know the answer that we have to cut the price if our competitor’s sales price is lower than us. But how? We have to figure out first which factor causes this problem and only after we find out the root cause then we can settle down and think about the solutions. Do we have higher sales prices cause we buy parts with higher prices than they do? Do we spend more money cause of inefficient process problem? Do we have higher inventory rate? These all cannot be main reason but only after we find out that, then we can move forward to the next step to solve the problem.
Currently I’m in the procurement Gr. in the company and my main jobs are things like cost management and development follow up but I also have to supply items to production lines on time to precede productions without problems. About 3 years ago, the situation was serious. As the production schedule is a main factor we have to consider before we release purchasing orders to suppliers, we have serious problems in correctness of this production plan and as the plan is not correct we have a inventory problems. Some items are stocked in a warehouse for several months and production lines yell us to provide another shorted items as soon as possible in contrary.
Correctness of production schedule is main factor for proper inventory level. If the plan is correct, you can possibly have proper inventory rate and if the plan changes dramatically like a crazy dancer, then we cannot know today what we have to buy tomorrow. People often mention about
To summarize this,
Stable production plan -> Proper inventory level and competitive unit price -> Increasing production efficiency and competitive sales price -> Sales increase
After considering business characteristic, we cannot expect similar level of stability like 3 month fixed production schedule but we cannot have any doubt that stable plan is a key factor for the company’s competitiveness. Then how can we have plans which are at least better than current ones? Just torment the production plan Gr. staff? After discussing this with related persons in the company, we had to admit that we couldn’t expect 100% accuracy if we considered unexpected situations but we also could confirm below problems.
Sales : They confirmed sales model line up and sales cost too late. Without these information we cannot expect sales volume.
Management planning : Sales model line up confirmed too late, so we have a too little time to calculate sales costs.
Production planning : Sales forecast were released too late so we cannot release production plan on time.
After considering above factors, we arranged internal meeting and set up a line up confirm deadline and decided to held periodical production meeting to share issues and discuss about the solutions. After this we can witness a gradual improvement as a result.
Results
1. You have to find out the main factor that causes the problem directly. If you just blame the person in charge, you cannot expect any improvement.
2. There is no royal road. To solve the problem, you have to scrutinize which can be the most efficient and easy way to solve the problem. Of course, you have to use every possible means and tools you can use to solve the problems.