551 Posts Found

New tools that help pinpoint complexity’s cost—and where it comes from—can help companies make better tradeoffs in managing product portfolios.

Authors: Alessandro Faure Ragani, Bikramjit Chaudhury, Ruth Heuss, Thorsten Schleyer | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Finance, Operations

In the current model of corporate capitalism, each company is treated as an economic island to be optimized individually. While this simplifies management and accountability, it masks the extent of economic and social interdependence between different stakeholders. In contrast, resilience is a property of systems: an individual company’s resilience means little if its supply base, customer base, or the social systems upon which it depends … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Kevin Whitaker, Martin Reeves | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Capitalism, Economics, Management, Operations

Online fakers are coming after everybody—but even the small and scrappy can fight back.

Content: Article | Author: Jennifer Alsever | Source: Inc. Magazine | Subjects: Intellectual Property, Legal, Operations

The age of the insular R&D organization is over. To serve as a company’s innovation engine, R&D strategy needs to be equipped for today’s fast-moving world.

Content: Article | Authors: Erik Roth, Joshua Katz, Philipp Ernst, Tom Brennan | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Operations

Optimizing service after the sale in the world of physical goods can have a significant impact on reducing field service costs.

Content: Article | Authors: Ben Henkes, Colin Glasgow, Jim Pearce, Sumeet Ladsaongikar | Source: Kearney | Subjects: Customer Related, Operations

Make or buy? To answer this classic manufacturing question, leading companies avoid the temptation to “feed the beast.” Instead, they focus on their core competencies and keep their long-term strategies in mind.

Content: Article | Authors: Fidel Tamayo, Patrick Van den Bossche | Source: Kearney | Subjects: Operations, Strategy

Kearney offers nine ways to interact with suppliers, identifying formulas that characterize true supplier relationship management.

Content: Article | Authors: Michael F. Strohmer, Mike Hales | Source: Kearney | Subject: Operations

Jaume Ribera breaks down the life cycle of a crisis into five stages and explores the challenges and opportunities each stage presents.

Content: Article | Author: Jaume Ribera | Source: IESE Insight | Subjects: Management, Operations

Some organizations worry that fostering innovation might jeopardize safety by introducing change, which many see as a source of risk. Our results, however, highlight the significance of line ownership: in our experience, one of the most effective bulwarks against accidents is the use of “near miss” programs, which encourage employees to identify hazardous situations and propose solutions before safety is jeopardized. Engaging employees in the … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Brooke Weddle, Jean-Benoît Grégoire Rousseau, Randy Lim | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Operations

New automation techniques can provide the first step toward continuous, tech-enabled redesign of critical operations—forming an intuitive ops-to-tech cycle in which tech improves ops, and vice versa.

Content: Article | Authors: Allen Weinberg, David Taylor, Federico Berruti | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: IT / Technology / E-Business, Operations

The elements of a good performance-management system are simple, but integrating them into a business’s fundamental operating system is more difficult than it seems.

Content: Article | Authors: Frédéric Gascon, John Douglas, Raffaele Carpi | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Management, Operations

While IoT-enabled advanced analytics could be worth trillions to manufacturers, turning insights into outcomes requires more than just the right technology.

Content: Article | Authors: Mark Patel, Richard Kelly, Subu Narayanan | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: IT / Technology / E-Business, Operations

Business needs to raise productivity more than ever. Thanks to innovations in digitization and analytics, four new methodologies can yield the productivity breakthroughs organizations need.

Content: Article | Authors: Kevin Speicher, Mercedes Goenaga, Philipp Radtke, Rafael Westinner | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Management, Operations

Caitlin Kalinowski is a master of the prototyping process, with a deep understanding of where, when and how changes should be slotted in, from the first iteration to the last. It’s made her a highly sought-after engineer in Silicon Valley. In this exclusive interview, Kalinowski discusses how and why you must define your non-negotiables before starting to build prototypes. She dives deep on specific approaches … [ Read more ]

Content: Thought Leader | Author: Caitlin Kalinowski | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Management, Operations | Companies: Apple, Oculus

Attempts to diversify may make supply chain disruptions more damaging when they occur.

Content: Article | Author: Karan Girotra | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subject: Operations

What strikes me as really interesting is that in advanced economic systems, we’re seeing that more and more products and services — at least, personal products and services — are being chosen on the basis of their perceived authenticity. Among consumers, the appeal of authenticity is stronger than almost any other attribute. I don’t know whether it means that quality has become so good that … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Glenn R. Carroll | Source: Stanford University | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales, Quality

Culture eats strategy for breakfast, operational excellence for lunch, and everything else for dinner.

Content: Quotation | Author: Bill Aulet | Subjects: Culture, Operations, Organizational Behavior, Strategy

Humans are extremely creative and flexible. The challenge of course is that sometimes they are tired or angry, and they make mistakes. From a Six Sigma perspective, all humans are considered to be at about a Three Sigma level, meaning that they perform a task with about 93 percent accuracy and 7 percent defects. Autonomation helps human beings perform tasks in a defect-free and safe … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Marc Onetto | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Operations

Some ideas, such as luxury goods and many smartphone apps, are destined for niche markets. Others, like social networks, work at global scale. Explicitly considering the appropriate magnitude and reach of a given idea is important to ensuring that the right resources and risks are involved in pursuing it. The seemingly safer option of scaling up over time can be a death sentence. Resources and … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Erik Roth, Marc de Jong, Nathan Marston | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Innovation, Management, Operations, Strategy

Functional silos almost assure suboptimal outcomes. Most business processes cross functional boundaries. One example is order to cash: sales receives an order, logistics undertakes fulfillment, and finance handles invoicing and cash. Managing a process through separate silos almost guarantees complexity. It creates internal inconsistencies and punishes the customer with foreseeable mistakes. There are exceptions, of course. One is the supply chain, which in many multinational … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Pascal Visée | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Management, Operations, Organizational Behavior