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MANAGING PROJECTS

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Projects represent nonroutine business activities that often have long-term strategic ramifications for a firm. In this chapter, we examined how projects differ from routine business activities and discussed the major phases of projects. We noted how environmental changes have resulted in increased attention being paid to projects and project management over the past decade. In the second half of the chapter, we introduced some basic tools that businesses can use when planning for and controlling projects. Both Gantt charts and network diagrams give managers a visual picture of how a project is going. Network diagrams have the added advantage of showing the precedence between activities, as well as the critical path(s). We wrapped up the chapter by showing how these concepts are embedded in inexpensive yet powerful software packages such as Microsoft Project. If you want to learn more about project management, we encourage you to take a look at the Web site for the Proj...
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The Synchronous Supply Chain

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The nature of business enterprise is changing. Today’s business is increasingly ‘boundaryless’, meaning that internal functional barriers are being eroded in favour of horizontal process management and externally the separation between vendors, distributors, customers and the firm is gradually lessening. This is the idea of the extended enterprise, which is transforming our thinking on how organisations compete and how value chains might be reformulated.
Leading organisations have long recognised that the key to success in supply chain management is the information system. However, what we are now learning is that there is a dimension to information that enables supply and demand to be matched in multiple markets, often with tailored products, in ever-shorter time-frames.
In the same way that the conventional wisdom in production and manufacturing is to seek economies of scale through larger batch quantities, similar thinking can often be found in the rest of the supply chain. The challenge to logistics management is to find ways in which these changed requirements can be achieved without an uneconomic escalation of costs. There may have to be trade-offs but the goal must be to improve total supply chain cost effectiveness.
The basic idea behind quick response (QR) is that in order to reap the advantages of time based competition it is necessary to develop systems that are responsive and fast.
As the demand by all partners in the supply chain for a quick response increases, the greater will be the pressure placed upon manufacturing to meet the customer’s needs for variety in shorter and shorter time-frames. The answer has to lie in flexibility. As we have already observed, if it were possible to reduce manufacturing and logistics lead times to zero then total flexibility could be achieved. In other words the organisation could respond to any request that was technologically feasible in any quantity. Whilst zero lead times are obviously not achievable, the new focus on flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) has highlighted the possibility of substantial progress in this direction.
Logistics systems are prone to what has been called the ‘Bullwhip’ or ‘Forrester Effect’, after Jay Forrester, who developed a set of techniques known as Industrial Dynamics. Forrester defined industrial dynamics as: The study of the information feedback characteristics of industrial activity to show how organizational structure, amplification (in policies) and time delays (in decisions and returns) interact to influence the success of the enterprise. It treats the interactions between the flows of information, money, orders, materials, personnel, and capital equipment in a company, an industry or a national economy.

 

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