Development of an Holistic Operational Management Strategy:
On the strength of over 100 industrial visits during the last 12 months, straight forward observational evidence demonstrates that today’s successful SMEs are those able to meet the most immediate demands, create profit in the face of variable costs and continually contribute to the long term purpose. However what is not so obvious is how they are achieving it without explicitly knowing what the ideal route for long term sustainability actually is.
This paper considers a variety of potential analysis tools available to managers for the assessment of the fitness of the company, and describes how any one may mislead the well-intentioned company director searching for the next initiative to take their company forward. In response, an integrated systems approach is used to propose a two level holistic operational management strategy (HOMS) to provide a continuous feedback to the operations management decision making process, which in turn feeds into the manufacturing control process, and ensures the long term survival of those SMEs adopting it.
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Hi Adebayo,
thanks for the question,
As mentioned, work is underway to input Fit to a number of test bed companies.
In addition, we can observe charactersitics of companies judged to be economically sustainable and assocaite the criteria seen with measurement metrics.
The basic elements will obviously include aspects of the financial, internal business, customer and learning/growth criteria.
This can be broken down into constituent tools/techniques/characteristics which can be assessed in terms of implementation.
Do you have any thoughts on this - any recommendations from your experience/observations?
Richard.
Hi Richard
Do you think that HOMS could be used as the foundations for the Fit manufacturing concept. If so, what parts of the HOMS model could be used to define Fit????
Hi Andrew,
The short answer is yes - I think that at this stage the HOMS is an important step in trying to visualise what could be achieved by Fit, having important aspects whcih I believe are key in defining Fit:
A real time feedback signal,
A variable input to the different themes of business improvement,
Taking a 'top-down' view of what specifically needs to be achieved to realise sustainable growth, and
A focus on the fact that Fit can be achieved as a balance of these elements depending on what the success criteria are.
The difficulty may arise in deciphering the input signals so that the critical components are not confused by company size, preferences, short term goals, exisiting 'best' practices etc...
This will come out as we continue to work with companies to input the Fit concept and extract data to reflet on its effect.
Rich.
Hi Richard,
Thank you for your comments. I really do not have any experience regarding measuring the fitness of an organisation. But I would think organisations that have 'achieved' economical sustainability, over five or decades should exhibit some common "fitness" feature than can be measured or investigated. Unfortunately, I do not have any reference to cite here which can be useful to investigate what these common features are. Any thoughts along this line yet?
Adebayo
The commonality of the characteristics may be alittle difficult - do we consider companies that have kept to a successful product/technology sustainable or one that is constrained and hence not conforming to our original thoughts of sustainability?
Similarly, is a company that has adapted, branched out, grown , been bought out and disected in separate business units sustainable due to the adaptability or unsustainable in the long run because it has dissolved into constituent parts?
Or maybe there is amedium ground where that latter case should have developed a core aspect to the business which still concentrates on its original knowledge bank?
Rich.
Excellent paper, and thoughts on taking this to corporate/enterprises levels. On a matter of staying fit for employees i'd suggest a proper diet and that the company if large enough serve only health food in their cafeteria's. Take a multi vitamin every day etc, i get all my discount vitamins online to save whenever possible. Plus there's usually a large selection
Dear authors,
Thank you for participating in IPROMS 2007 Virtual Conference through your paper. In simple words, how will you define enterprise fitness and what are the criteria for assessing same?
Thank you.
Adebayo