From the category archives:

costs

I’m Nobody Special, But I’m Speaking Anyway

by Pete Abilla January 22, 2008

Yes, my face is on the front cover of the brochure (PDF Download).  But, little does the audience know that that picture (I’m the second, from the left, but better viewed in the PDF brochure) was taken while I was sitting on a fake sheep during a family trip to the animal farm at Thanksgiving [...]

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Raising Dust, Vision, and Business Problems

by Pete Abilla November 6, 2007

In the Treatise on Principles Concerning Human Knowledge, published in 1685, George Berkeley said: We have first raised the dust, and then we complain that we cannot see.   Berkeley was describing something entirely different, but his comment is, I believe, an accurate indictment of most, or all, business problems that we face. Readers — thoughts?  [...]

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Feigenbaum on Quality

by Pete Abilla October 13, 2007

The Mckinsey Quarterly recently published an interview with Armand V. Feigenbaum, a long-time proponent of Quality, former Director of Worldwide Manufacturing at GE, and renown author on Quality.  The interview is not terribly interesting, but he does share some very obvious things worth reiterating: the customer is not an inspector and the customer judges quality [...]

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Complexity: Different Ways, Same Output, or is It?

by Pete Abilla April 7, 2007

There are outputs and the processes that produce those outputs.  In a business, if there are many processes that produce the same output — that can be a silent killer for a business. Consider an inventory management system, where associates on the factory floor are to use a scanner-based tool to adjust physical inventory in [...]

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Attacking Business Complexity

by Pete Abilla April 6, 2007

Many have argued that there is an inverse relationship between business or product complexity and customer satisfaction: the more complex a product or business is, the less satisfied the customer tends to be.  Yet, many businesses do little to curb their complexity woes. In 2003, H.J. Heinz recognized their complexity issues and attacked it head-on.  [...]

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Process Measures — Productivity and Efficiency

by Pete Abilla February 2, 2007

Part of managing processes is to measure their performance.  This article will discuss 2 basic process measures: Productivity and Efficiency. Productivity Simply, productivity is measured like this: Productivity = Outputs / Inputs For instance, Productivity Example   Quantity $/Unit Car X 4000 $8,000 Car Y 6000 $9,500 Labor Hours for X 20,000 $12/Hour Labor Hours [...]

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The Apple iPhone Supply Chain

by Pete Abilla January 18, 2007

I am teaching a class in Operations and Supply Chain Management at the Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University. As part of that class, we discuss global supply chain strategy as well as other things pertaining to Operations.  I thought it might be fun to map the supply chain of the new Apple [...]

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Analyzing LicketyShip

by Pete Abilla January 15, 2007

I’ll be providing a take-home quiz to my students tomorrow. I want to provide thoughtful dialogue and inquiry, rather than the typical, boring, uninspiring material that some classes provide. I’ll be asking my students to consider LicketyShip as a case and ask them to discuss LicketyShip in the framework of the four performance dimension: Time, [...]

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