A black hole is an object whose gravitational pull is so strong that nothing - not even light - can escape from it. Although predicted by Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, the existence of black holes in our galaxy and elsewhere has only recently been confirmed. A black hole forms when a massive star dies and collapses under its own mass.

For all but a few astronomers, black holes are unknown in the realm of ordinary experience. Analogs do exist, however, in the more terrestrial domain of business process reengineering and take the form of supply chain management implementations.

Similar to their gravitational counterparts, supply chain management implementations can grow to vast, unanticipated proportions, enveloping unbudgeted amounts of time, resources, and money. A crucial difference between the two is that supply chain projects can be kept to a manageable size by making careful preparations and setting realistic expectations at the outset. The following real-life examples offer insights that may help prevent your supply chain project from collapsing into oblivion, taking your enterprise with it.

Case 1:

Problem

Five months into the implementation of a factory scheduling system at a mid-sized PC assembly facility and one month before going live, planners were asked to help perform the system test of the application, during which daily workflow would be checked against requirements.

Planning involved making a survey of the next few days of PC orders, the required components indicated by the Bill of Materials, and the current inventory so that new components could be procured in time to meet the demand. Planners relied on a metric known as "days of inventory," calculated for each component SKU (stock keeping unit) by subtracting all components needed for each day of production successively from inventory until the inventory was exhausted. The number of days that would bring inventory to zero was that component's days of inventory.

Unfortunately, the new system had no capability for computing this value and planners found that to generate it, they had to page through hundreds of scheduled orders, sorted by finished SKU, use the software's capability for reverse BOM explosion to get the components, total the needed components by SKU in a spreadsheet and then manually subtract the totals one day at a time from the inventory, also provided by the system. The software selected for the new system had no capability to produce the required metric. Needless to state, the manual steps completely derailed the workflow and the planners revolted.

SOURCE:http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/how-supply-chain-projects-morph-into-black-holes-16781/

A black hole is an object whose gravitational pull is so strong that nothing - not even light - can escape from it. Although predicted by Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, the existence of black holes in our galaxy and elsewhere has only recently been confirmed. A black hole forms when a massive star dies and collapses under its own mass.

For all but a few astronomers, black holes are unknown in the realm of ordinary experience. Analogs do exist, however, in the more terrestrial domain of business process reengineering and take the form of supply chain management implementations.

Similar to their gravitational counterparts, supply chain management implementations can grow to vast, unanticipated proportions, enveloping unbudgeted amounts of time, resources, and money. A crucial difference between the two is that supply chain projects can be kept to a manageable size by making careful preparations and setting realistic expectations at the outset. The following real-life examples offer insights that may help prevent your supply chain project from collapsing into oblivion, taking your enterprise with it.

Case 1:

Problem

Five months into the implementation of a factory scheduling system at a mid-sized PC assembly facility and one month before going live, planners were asked to help perform the system test of the application, during which daily workflow would be checked against requirements.

Planning involved making a survey of the next few days of PC orders, the required components indicated by the Bill of Materials, and the current inventory so that new components could be procured in time to meet the demand. Planners relied on a metric known as "days of inventory," calculated for each component SKU (stock keeping unit) by subtracting all components needed for each day of production successively from inventory until the inventory was exhausted. The number of days that would bring inventory to zero was that component's days of inventory.

Unfortunately, the new system had no capability for computing this value and planners found that to generate it, they had to page through hundreds of scheduled orders, sorted by finished SKU, use the software's capability for reverse BOM explosion to get the components, total the needed components by SKU in a spreadsheet and then manually subtract the totals one day at a time from the inventory, also provided by the system. The software selected for the new system had no capability to produce the required metric. Needless to state, the manual steps completely derailed the workflow and the planners revolted.

SOURCE:http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/how-supply-chain-projects-morph-into-black-holes-16781/