Resilience taken for advantage

Yossi Sheffi
Director, MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics; Professor, Engineering Systems, MIT

CTL Director Yossi Sheffi discusses his book The Resilient Enterprise: Overcoming Vulnerability for Competitive Advantage, in which he argues that a company’s survival and prosperity depend more on what it does before a disruption occurs than on the actions it takes as the event unfolds. Dr. Sheffi focuses not only on security but on corporate resilience - the ability to bounce back from such disruptions - and how to turn that resilience into competitive advantage.

You can really avoid disruptions in the (organizational) system seeing and act on the "weak signs".

How could this be used for building some SD model to make the right policies seeable?

Underlying structure - what's that?

A recent answer on a comment (on a discussion board entry)  questioning the outcome of a company in an economic downturn.

Other person answering, "Which structure? The persons acted all on their best knowledge and intentions, we can't blame them."

This sounds like the systemic view is unknown in the "real" world and things are taken as they are.

How can the abstract word "structure" better connect to what it really means?

Ralf

Process Improvement - feeding in the rear end:-(

Nowadays, Lean Production, Process Improvement, Zero-Defect-Quality, and alike are common wispers around factory floors. Everybody is eager to decrease the costs for making products/services in order to compete with a global market. Toyota is the obvious hero on the horizon and yet things don't work out as they should.

What is going on?

Obviously while sensing quality problems your process improvement effort will kick into action and will finally lead to higher production quality (isn't that what we truely wanted?).

What are the effects of an improvement effort? Sometimes, you just get more throughput with holding the number of workers on the same level, or you decrease the number of workers in that specific area (after a while) do the same throughut as before, slowly sensing that more could be done as customers are buying your -now cheaper- products that have higher quality. And -somehow a bit out of the blue- suddenly your production quality drops again.

Because of delayed removing of people (either from just the department or the organization) one has less people to do rework (if necessary) in order to obtain the desired production quality.

How to solve that mystery?

Hasn't that question stepped on your mind also not too long ago?

Best regards,

Ralf