Pergunta ingénua do dia (parte II)

Continuado daqui.
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Em 1988, a revista Harvard Business Review publicou o artigo "Time - The Next Source of Competitive Advantage" escrito por George Stalk Jr.
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O artigo começa com:
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"Like competition itself, competitive advantage is a constantly moving target. For any company in any industry, the key is not to get stuck with a single simple notion of its source of advantage. The best competitors, the most successful ones, know how to keep moving and always stay on the cutting edge.
Today, time is on the cutting edge. The ways leading companies manage time--in production, in new product development and introduction, in sales and distribution--represent the most powerful new sources of competitive advantage." (Moi ici: Está sempre a mudar, ou antes, está sempre em evolução)
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(Moi ici: Interessante esta evolução histórica que se segue. Será que podemos generalizar e fazer um paralelismo?) "In the period immediately following World War II, Japanese companies used their low labor costs to gain entry to various industries. As wage rates rose and technology became more significant, the Japanese shifted first to scale-based strategies and then to focused factories to achieve advantage. The advent of just-in-time production brought with it a move to flexible factories, as leading Japanese companies sought both low cost and great variety in the market. Cutting-edge Japanese companies today are capitalizing on time as a critical source of competitive advantage: shortening the planning loop in the product development cycle and trimming process time in the factory--managing time the way most companies manage costs, quality, or inventory.
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In fact, as a strategic weapon, time is the equivalent of money, productivity, quality, even innovation. Managing time has enabled top Japanese companies not only to reduce their costs but also to offer broad product lines, cover more market segments, and upgrade the technological sophistication of their products. These companies are time-based competitors.
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From Low Wages to Variety Wars Since 1945, Japanese competitors have shifted their strategic focus at least four times. These early adaptations were straightforward; the shift to time-based competitive advantage is not nearly so obvious. It does, however, represent a logical evolution from the earlier stages."
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Há tempos descobri os livros da David Birnbaum que me mostraram números sobre a explosão de SKUs e o seu efeito no aumento da volatilidade e incerteza na previsão da procura.
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Pois bem, voltando ao artigo de 1988:
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"Today's new-generation companies compete with flexible manufacturing and rapid-response systems, expanding variety and increasing innovation. A company that builds its strategy on this cycle is a more powerful competitor than one with a traditional strategy based on low wages, scale, or focus. These older, cost-based strategies require managers to do whatever is necessary to drive down costs: move production to or source from a low-wage country; build new facilities or consolidate old plants to gain economies of scale; or focus operations down to the most economic subset of activities. These tactics reduce costs but at the expense of responsiveness. (Moi ici: Wrong move para quem lida com clientes que estão no ramo da moda ou da flexibilidade, por exemplo)
In contrast, strategies based on the cycle of flexible manufacturing, rapid response, expanding variety, and increasing innovation are time based. Factories are close to the customers they serve. Organization structures enable fast responses rather than low costs and control. Companies concentrate on reducing if not eliminating delays and using their response advantages to attract the most profitable customers."
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Aumento de SKUs, aumento da capacidade de escolha, aumento da diversidade, aumento da volatilidade e incerteza e...
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"Traditional manufacturing requires long lead times to resolve conflicts between various jobs or activities that require the same resources. The long lead times, in turn, require sales forecasts to guide planning. But sales forecasts are inevitably wrong; by definition they are guesses, however informed. Naturally, as lead times lengthen, the accuracy of sales forecasts declines. With more forecasting errors, inventories balloon and the need for safety stocks at all levels increases. Errors in forecasting also mean more unscheduled jobs that have to be expedited, thereby crowding out scheduled jobs. The need for longer lead times grows even greater and the planning loop expands even more, driving up costs, increasing delays, and creating system inefficiencies. (Moi ici: É esta realidade, a par do aumento de SKUs, que longe do prime-time dos media, está a re-criar as coisas para uma re-industrialização europeia, não para a massa, não para a escala, não para o volume, mas seguindo o padrão japonês retratado inicialmente)
Managers who find themselves trapped in the planning loop often respond by asking for better forecasts and longer lead times. In other words, they treat the symptoms and worsen the problem. The only way to break the planning loop is to reduce the consumption of time throughout the system; that will, in turn, cut the need for lead time, for estimates, for safety stocks, and all the rest. After all, if a company could ever drive its lead time all the way to zero, it would have to forecast only the next day's sales. While that idea of course is unrealistic, (Moi ici: Não há impossíveis. Como a forçar? Como a tornar possível?) successful time-based competitors in Japan and in the West have kept their lead times from growing and some have even reduced them, thereby diminishing the planning loop's damaging effects."
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"What distorts the system so badly is time: the lengthy delay between the event that creates the new demand and the time when the factory finally receives the information. The longer that delay, the more distorted is the view of the market. Those distortions reverberate throughout the system, producing disruption, waste, and inefficiency.
These distortions plague business today. To escape them, companies have a choice: they can produce to forecast or they can reduce the time delays in the flow of information and product through the system. The traditional solution is to produce to forecast. The new approach is to reduce time consumption.
Because time flows throughout the system, focusing on time-based competitive performance results in improvements across the board. Companies generally become time-based competitors by first correcting their manufacturing techniques, then fixing sales and distribution, and finally adjusting their approach to innovation. Ultimately, it becomes the basis for a company's overall strategy."
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Esta revolução do tempo, a par da subida dos salários chineses, da conflitualidade laboral na China, do yuan, do consumo doméstico chinês... não é compatível com o sonho do presidente da CIP.
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Em vez de fazer batota e promover a reflexão e a acção bottom-up a nível da micro-economia para aproveitarem o regresso da indústria à Europa, entretém-se com o que interessa às empresas do regime que vivem de rendas.




Continua.