“You can’t have agility everywhere, at any cost, so you have to cope with rigidity points and try to leverage them.”
They don’t talk about KPIs but instead how to get intelligence out of the data. It requires a completely different mindset. For some people this is incomprehensible and it’s why people find it diffi- cult to communicate with each other.”
Y
ou are often presented as a role model for women in industrial manufacturing. How do you feel about that?
How do you build in agility when the job to be done is changing? “A very important concept was to fully understand the value chain and where it can be less flexible. You can’t have agility everywhere at any cost so you have to cope with rigidity points and try to lev- erage them. You have to accept that this portion of your process means that a factory is not agile, not at all.
When you can visualize the rigidity point in the value chain you can front load as much as possible so this point becomes just a step, rather than a bottleneck. Your capability to anticipate is very important and it’s the reason why we put in place a process of S&OP to facilitate this front loading and create much more vis- ibility around it.”
Is supply chain part of the R&D cycle?
“No. R&D develops a standard solution with a platform for cus- tomization on a made-to-order basis. Sometimes the modifica- tion is minimal, but it can be substantial. All buildings are differ- ent and the requirements, for example in Asia are quite different. Likewise spare parts are not off-the-shelf, and often are commis- sioned. Obsoleteness is definitely a topic so we try to maintain a certain level of standardization, for example electronics, with a long life cycle. We own the software and have a very skilled organization that runs it.”
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Are you recruiting different kinds of people than a few years a go? “Yes, we hire more data analysts although they are not easy to find and they are very different from traditional supply chain peo- ple. Whereas operational people see input-output, data analysts go beyond that: They think what we don’t yet see. Sometimes when they explain how implementing A will have an influence on B, people look at them as if to say what are you talking about. Their concept of data is also very different. Data for supply chain are usually figures that are presented in cells in excel files that can be used for activities with a function and turned into a graph and eventually a dashboard: Data analysts don’t do excel files or dashboards because data is dynamic and a dashboard is static.
“I was re-hired at Schindler because they know I’m a professional supply chain person. After nine months they asked me if I would act as a role model, just to show what can be achieved in our industry. The supply chain has more to offer women than just pur- chasing. There are jobs available in the factory and in logistics etc. Firstly I believe it’s important to have women in such roles because otherwise the market may not take us seriously: It might question whether our company is sustainable if we are not open to opportunities in which diversity plays a part. Secondly, our customer base has become more and more diverse and, especially in Asia, the decision makers include more and more women. And thirdly, we need more talent. It’s a waste if we only fish in half the talent pool.”
What is your main message to our supply chain readers? “Before engaging in any transformation, consider what job has be done: How can Supply Chain create value for my custom- ers? If you don’t understand that, you won’t understand its value. The job to be done has to be done completely, not just for inter- nal customers but also their customers, the global contractors, and eventually the end customer, the passenger. Once you know the job to be done, you then need to understand the difference between ‘the job to be done’ and ‘the job to be done today’. Then you start to connect, the transformation begins and you start to think about the next step. For sure, you first use methodology to create a certain modulari- zation because when you are in a complex supply chain you can- not touch everywhere with the same priority; you need a frame- work to understand where you need to act first. But it is not always the low hanging fruit. In my case the single entry point was not the low hanging fruit but it needed to happen at the same time as the other activities.”
Interview conducted by:
Martijn Lofvers Owner, Publisher & Editior-in-Chief Supply Chain Movement
martijn.lofvers@supplychainmedia.nl
Oskar Verkamman Managing Director Inspired-Search
0skar@inspired-search.com
SUPPLY CHAIN MOVEMENT, No.29, Q2 2018
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