Archive for category: Management stories

The idea

The idea of Mr. Johnson having some kind of competitive advantage, due to a certificate of merit assigned  by some certification body, was bothering Mr. Smith. The products offered by Smith were good and the company was a model of organization, so if Johnson obtained a certification, Smith should have had it too.

Mr. Smith started working on it, he immediately called a supervisor to understand how to obtain a certification, since Smith was no less qualified than Johnson. The supervisor gave all the information necessary to Mr. Quality, while they were waiting for the certification.

So, they began defining the procedures, writing down handbooks, informing the operators and elaborating new organizational rules; then, one day, some impartial agents went to Smith to check that everything was set.  Finally, even with some reservation, they assigned the awaited certification of merit to Smith.

Mr. Smith and his loyal MRP (Mr. Smith’s misadventures continue…).

There was once an old and loyal MRP which kept spending its time suggesting to its master, Mr. Smith, how to run his company:

1.  it collected information about customers’ orders and selling reviews;

2.  it deeply investigated the products ordered to see how they were made (base bill) in order to have a clear vision of what to do or buy to produce what customers needed;

3.   it controlled what was already done (final products) and what to do (wip);

4.   it tried to understand whether the things to do were feasible (CRP) and promptly gave a list of actions or suggestions about what had to be done (because its master wanted to call the shots); it even remembered that there were quantities to add when the company was producing or buying, because it was not possible and convenient to have less than a certain quantity (lots).

Everything was working out like a Swiss watch (at that time, Japanese did not produce it yet).

Everything was working out so well that, one day, Mr. Smith, who wanted to produce more and more,  decided to buy the company of Mr. Johnson, who had always helped him working for him sometimes.

He created Smith 1 and Smith 2, naming them MRP 1 and MRP 2 in order not to confuse his assistants.

The introduction and the spread of modern information systems have involved a very strong modification in the management procedures. We used to know environments in which the management was based on the employees’ total mastery on the logic that regulates the range of procedures, on the knowledge of the life history of all the products, on the memory of each product’s specific features; now, we are in front of an environment in which the management results to be more depersonalized and less dependent from the management life of the several products.

Undoubtedly, there have been considerable improvements regarding the information exactness, the elaborative logics sophistication, the procedures’ visibility and clearness, as well as a larger sharing of data among the different areas of a company.