Putting the Structure in Decision Making

This is an excerpt of the original article. It was written for the May-June 2010 edition of Supply Chain Management Review. The full article is available to current subscribers.

May-June 2010

Spring is a time for renewal. It's a time for re-assessing the way we've been doing things and making changes in a manner that ensures forward progress. That's a recurring theme of the articles in the May/June issue of Supply Chain Management Review. With the building blocks in place and the spirit of renewal in full bloom, who knows what level of supply chain excellence can be achieved?

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Many supply chain managers make the critical error or equating making decisions with solving problems. Decision making is not problem solving. Decision making is specific to the person. Problem solving is specific to the problem. Our work suggests that problem solvers are not necessarily the best decision-makers, and perhaps vice versa.

We have all heard the jokes liked “to a surgeon, cutting can fix anything” or “to a chiropractor, manipulation can fix anything” or “to a psychologist, everything’s mental.”  These jokes are, of course, not fair to those professionals, particularly the good ones. But don’t we have the same kind of =phenomenon with our supply chain decision making? Some will advocate that “lean can fix everything” or hat “everyone needs to do Six Sigma.”

Again, we don’t want to criticize the advocates of those techniques, just as we don’t want to disparage surgeons   or chiropractors of psychologists. It’s just that we need to take a longer, more analytical look at our supply chain decisions and not simply jump in with the latest buzzword. We believe one of the reason companies have so much trouble with their supply chains is a lack of structured decision-making process…We offer seen steps to a more structured approach to supply chain decision-making.

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