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Beyond the Giants (10)

Updated: Oct 12, 2022

Conditions for survival in the manufacturing industry in VUCA era

Satoru Murakami

CEO Goal-System consultants Inc.,


What is a giant's shoulder? -Following the history of manufacturing(1) Basics of manufacturing that has not changed for 100 years


Until the last time, I have examined the history of the giants who have built a paradigm that emphasizes flow. This time, let's think about how to proceed with the tasks to realize this paradigm. A system that manages and controls manufacturing operations. In the academic field, these are the fields called "Operation Management". In general, operation management is a general term for management technology for planning, executing, and building products that the actual production of "parts" by combining "people" who work and "machinery and equipment" who process them in order to create industrial products.


Operation control technology is indispensable for manufacturing by division of labor, and in order to learn such technology, operation management including operation control is compulsory in MBA programs of most universities in Europe and the United States. The major purpose of this academic field called operations management is "to make ordinary people work together to accomplish a big job", that is, the technology of the division of labor itself that we have refined so far.


There is a limit to what a normal human can do alone. But if you work with others, you can do a great job. That is the significance of operations management. Not only in the field of manufacturing, but also in the backyard of convenience stores, storefronts of service industries, stores of financial institutions, etc., even if the form and content of work are different, the superiority or inferiority of the operation greatly affects the result. Operation Management is the "technology to create a work system" itself, so the university actively teaches operations management. 


The background to the need for such operation management is that not only factories but also operations that assume division of labor have the characteristics of a huge network type that is "bound by subordination." This subordination is connected not only to the order of physical work, but also to all kinds of work of the company such as raw material procurement and design work.


In real work, when both the order dependence of processes and work and the variability that work time varies due to various factors are combined, it is exactly when and how these delays occur is unpredictable and causes great disruption to the factory's production system. In fact, the reality of the day-to-day management of field managers is that they are trying to somehow mitigate the confusion that occurs on a daily basis.


In fact, these network-type operations have the troublesome characteristic that only delays propagate and early completion hardly propagates. This phenomenon occurs whether the network is linear or multiple events merge. In other words, whole of business networks that assume division of labor have the troublesome characteristic that "early completion" that occurs as a result of various fluctuations does not propagate, and "delay" propagates almost as it is.


Next time, let's take a closer look at these annoying characteristics.





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