Coming from an FMCG supply chain upbringing the bureaucracy and waste is absurd in the the part of healthcare I am currently in.
Its surreal. Going through the motions again and again. Re-visiting the new issues stemming from the same source.
One of my team, rather wryly said – watch Brazil – so I did. I have never laughed so hard or quite felt such familiarity in such bizarre working practices as I do now.
I see Leaders with too much invested in the too near future; without enough knowledge of their system to do a great job at making sure that we don’t expose ourselves to the same mistakes over and over again.
I feel They haven’t got the measure of the place. They definitely have clarity on the one measure that is important to our stakeholders. The fact that I see the behaviour to achieve the objective as marginally tending to lacking in integrity is somewhat disconcerting at times.
I need to give the leaders credit – they have come a long way from the SKU availability of 85% in the portfolio that they had within the last two years. Interestingly though I suspect that some of those problems stem from some of the behaviors that I see now. So how do we get our leaders out of our short term futures and back to the long term futures where their noses and their managers noses should be at?
Measures and Metrics. (I’m always struggling to remember the difference between these two so hang on a minute while I check a nice easy online example). So remembering that a measure is something that I can measure and that a metric is something I calculate from more than one measure I am back on the road.
So the way we get our leaders off our backs is to give them good data that support good measures that in turn support good metrics. Easy right? Well it has been an interesting journey so far. I’ll not list the obstacles of different SAP instances; different forecasting instances and a decided difference in master data structure between all three systems. I long for the annoying but incredibly liberating and powerful discipline that good master data governance produces.
So working with an incredibly talented PHD student on loan from Bangor Labs, we are building new insights for the business. We have created a new set of data pulling together different systems and are just beginning to visualize the rich and complex supply chain and manufacturing process that is biological manufacture of immuno-assays.
