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Does agility induce stress in your Supply Chain team?
A whole lot of companies are keen to make their supply chains more agile. Some of them have moved far ahead in their journey and adopted several agile practices. When I speak to their teams, I get two distinctly different responses.
Some teams are enthusiastic about the whole experience. They find that their work has been simplified, it is smoother with hardly any firefighting. A few companies, however, say that agility has induced higher level of stress in their teams. While the results are impressive for both sets, their employee experiences are poles apart. Why is that?
The difference lies in the way agile practices have been implemented. The right way is to focus on processes and tweak them to reduce demand latency, planning latency and execution latency. It results in simplified processes and lower work load for the team, while delivering exemplary results.
However, I do come across some implementations where the focus was on technology implementation. Their teams didn’t know why AI/ML based models were used for demand sensing, why the planning and execution cycles were made shorter and more frequent, why batch sizes were reduced. No wonder they got stressed.
If you are on your agile journey and find it strenuous, do reach out to me. We need to change the focus of implementation to make it an enjoyable pursuit. The results will also improve!