Option Solving Blog

Recently I was working with a production manager who was pretty new to his company and its challenging, high growth production assignment. Unlike a lot of production oriented companies during today’s recession, the company’s production requirements were growing rapidly: which means plenty of overtime on the shop floor. One of his important priorities is to get a handle on its production flow and material needs to be able to keep important customers happy with delivery times.

He was faced with considerations such as getting the right level of detail, getting everyone on board, keeping the budget realistic, and not letting everyone involved  become bogged down in system implementation. With this in mind, he created a question similar to the one shown in the Latest Example.

Once the question was in place, his more extreme “bookends” fell into place fairly easily: “Remain with the current ad hoc manual approach” or at the other end “Set-up a Fully Integrated MRP system.” With these in place, he was able to come up with a healthy series of five options for consideration by himself and his senior colleagues: some of which are in the latest example.

With these complete, we set our picture aside for 10-15 minutes to create some emotional distancing. Our other conversation over, we returned to his option picture, where I challenged him to use his intuitive experience to pick the option which best answered his question. He was quite content with his intuitive answer: so his issue was solved!

He, like many other option solving participants, was quite surprised at how quickly his issue was solved.  Perhaps he was a little disappointed that it wasn’t more of a struggle. Perhaps there was a “trick” to make it turn out so easily? Not so. By using the power of his intuitive mind, it made the resolution of his issue so much simpler!    

Please refer to the Latest Example to access the overall picture. If you have an example of your own, please share it with this blogger, through the COMMENTS area. 

Thanks Option Solving. (NOTE: Next posting in 2 weeks: “Using Option Solving to decide on ‘Handling Corporate’s Need for Business Information?’”  You’re your COMMENTS or go to peter @ileadershipsolutions.com to connect with the blogger.)

Filed under: Business Decision Making | Tagged: Production Scheduling |