Lembram-se do banhista gordo?

Lembram-se do banhista gordo?

Confrontar com "Logistics Bottlenecks Hamper Efforts to Produce Less in China":

"Companies looking to move some production from China to other Asian countries to avoid mounting U.S. tariffs on Chinese imports face significant bumps in the road.
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Manufacturers and supply-chain experts say logistics infrastructure in Southeast Asia, where many goods-makers are scouting for new production sites, remains far less developed than China’s long-established connections between factories, suppliers and customers around the world.
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Poor roads, sparse rail lines and congested ports in Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Cambodia and other potential manufacturing destinations in Southeast Asia have stretched out delivery schedules and raised shipping costs, according to manufacturing and transportation company executives, even as companies have migrated some factory work to the region in the past decade in search of lower labor costs.
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Even before U.S. tariffs, factory work in Southeast Asia has been growing as companies have sought lower costs while wages and other expenses in China have increased. That manufacturing migration has taken on more urgency for some producers as the trade conflict between the U.S. and Washington has heated up, with a new round of back-and-forth tariffs this spring and threats of higher levies this summer."

A vida é um eterno retorno (parte II)

Parte I.

A propósito de "Fashion chains use factories in Africa that pay £5 a week"... e de "Não está fácil":

"Tivemos um recuo na ordem dos 3% nas vendas ao exterior [Moi ici: em 2018] e a surpresa foi apenas uma: já não estávamos habituados.
...
No primeiro trimestre ainda sofremos uma quebra de 10%" [Moi ici: em 2019] 

Começámos uma recuperação de 10 anos no sector do calçado tirando partido da carta da rapidez face à China. No entanto, cada vez mais alternativas rápidas vão surgindo e com custos mais baixos.

Abordagem baseada no risco e os processos

Ontem recebi uma pergunta interessante:

"Estou um pouco confuso sobre se as inspecções de recepção das mercadorias dos clientes devem ou não ser incluídas no procedimento de recepção.  Somos um armazém que recebe e armazena as mercadorias dos clientes. Como os produtos não são de fornecedores, mas de clientes, as verificações a serem realizadas precisam estar no procedimento de recepção?"

A pergunta é interessante porque permite exemplificar como sempre vi a aplicação aos processos da abordagem baseada no risco.

Vamos imaginar que o autor da pergunta observou as actividades em torno da recepção de mercadorias do cliente para serem armazenadas no seu armazém. Vamos supor tenha anotado as seguintes atividades:

• Receber camião;
• Verifique papéis;
• Determinar o local de armazenamento;
• Descarregar camião; 
• Armazenar mercadorias;
• Atualizar inventário.

Agora, aplicando a abordagem baseada no risco e pensando com as pessoas que trabalham no processo: o que é que pode correr mal no processo?

E listam-se coisas como:

• Recepção de mercadorias endereçadas a outros;
• Recepção de mercadorias (quantidades e / ou referências) diferentes do que está no manifesto de carga;
• Recepção de mercadorias com embalagem danificada ou violada;
• …

Agora, há que aplicar uma avaliação a estes riscos, para os classificar como críticos ou não críticos.

Se a organização considera alguns dos riscos determinados como críticos, então é preciso desenvolver planos de ação para lidar com esses riscos críticos. Um dos planos de ação pode ser verificar quantidades e referências durante a descarga e registar o resultado. Outro plano de ação poderá ser a criação de um conjunto de imagens que serão usadas para classificar um dano ou violação de embalagem como relevante. Nesse caso, os eventos são registados, fotografados e comunicados imediatamente ao cliente.

A organização não usará os produtos, mas será responsável pelas quantidades e estado enquanto estiver à sua guarda.

Se os riscos são críticos, então as acções realizadas diariamente para os controlar ou minimizar devem fazer parte do procedimento.

Será que sabe?

Vi a montra e sorri.

Reparem na mensagem a vermelho abaixo do preço: 100% pele

Cada vez mais gente procura alternativas à pele.

Será que o lojista sabe? Será que o lojista não sabe? Será que é uma opção estratégica deliberada? Será que é uma herança não questionada?

"brand feedback mechanism"

“we felt uneasy buying something that cost a few hundred pounds without the reassurance of a recognizable name.
...
Without the brand feedback mechanism, there was no incentive for any one manufacturer to make a safer, better version of the board, since they were not positioned to reap the gains. As a result, the market became a commoditised race to the bottom, in which both innovation and quality control fail. Why make a better product if no one knows it was you who made it? So no one did make a better board, and the whole category more or less died as a result. It may correct itself if better boards arise, or if a shrewd company such as Samsung cannily attaches its name to the best.
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Branding isn’t just something to add to great products – it’s essential to their existence.”

Uma marca é o princípio da concorrência imperfeita, como bem sabia o totó do Chamberlin.

Não está fácil

"A quebra das exportações em 2018 foi uma surpresa? Estamos num setor que cresce praticamente há uma década de forma consecutiva. Desde 2008, as exportações portuguesas de calçado cresceram cerca de 50% e o emprego aumentou mais de 20%. É normal que haja algum pequeno reajustamento. Tivemos um recuo na ordem dos 3% nas vendas ao exterior e a surpresa foi apenas uma: já não estávamos habituados.
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E como começou o ano para a indústria portuguesa de calçado? O início do ano foi, ainda, um período de contenção. Nos dois últimos anos, o retalho tem sido muito fustigado, nomeadamente no centro da Europa. Desapareceram centenas de retalhistas e tivemos de procurar novos clientes. Não é fácil. No primeiro trimestre ainda sofremos uma quebra de 10%, mas as nossas previsões apontam para um segundo semestre já mais favorável."

Recordar:

Trecho retirado de "Luís Onofre: “O que é preocupante é perceber que o mercado não é tão grande como um dia ambicionamos”"

Mongo e magia (parte IX)

Parte I , parte II, parte III, parte IV, parte V, parte VI, parte VII e parte VIII.

“no one believes in magic any more. Yet magic does still exist – it is found in the fields of psychology, biology and the science of perception, rather than in physics and chemistry. And it can be created.
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We don’t value things; we value their meaning. What they are is determined by the laws of physics, but what they mean is determined by the laws of psychology.
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but had got it into their heads that the value of something lies solely in what it is. This was a false assumption, because you don’t need to tinker with atomic structure to make lead as valuable as gold – all you need to do is to tinker with human psychology so that it feels as valuable as gold. At which point, who cares that it isn’t actually gold?
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If you think that’s impossible, look at the paper money in your wallet or purse; the value is exclusively psychological. Value resides not in the thing itself, but in the minds of those who value it. You can therefore create (or destroy) value it in two ways – either by changing the thing or by changing minds about what it is.”

Trechos retirados de "Alchemy: Or, the Art and Science of Conceiving Effective Ideas That Logical People Will Hate" de Rory Sutherland.

Curiosidade do dia II

A normandagem, os esbirros do João Sem Terra cá do sítio, têm de aumentar o saque para pagar o resgate de Ricardo Coração de Leão.

Toda a gente sabe que isso era um bode expiatório, o dinheiro era para pagar à casta normanda. As famílias e os 800 mil funcionários ficam muito caros. O resto é paisagem.

Curiosidade do dia I

Hoje, pouco antes das 9h da manhã, enquanto circulava numa autoestrada ouvia o Nico do laço entusiasmado porque mais uma empresa de software se vai instalar em Portugal.

Nico explicava que estas empresas vem para Portugal por causa de uma série de vantagens competitivas que ele enumerava, entre as quais a criatividade lusa e eu ria-me.

Tenho gente cá em casa que anda a sondar o mercado para programadores na Alemanha, Suíça et al.

Por exemplo, na Suíça um programador com um ano de experiência pode entrar a ganhar 5000 euros por mês, em Portugal pode estar a ganhar 1000-1100 e com n jogadas para reduzir saque impostal.

O Nico não se lembrou desta vantagem.

Mongo e magia (parte VIII)

Parte I , parte II, parte III, parte IV, parte V, parte VI e parte VII.

Um texto que parece tirado deste blogue:

“Business, technology and, to a great extent, government have spent the last several decades engaged in an unrelenting quest for measurable gains in efficiency. [Moi ici: No caso dos governos basta recordar a paranóia das escolas-cidade e hospitais-cidade, basta recordar o meu ataque ao eficientismo e ao denominador, o desconhecimento do Evangelho do Valor] However, what they have never asked, is whether people like efficiency as much as economic theory believes they do. The ‘doorman fallacy’, as I call it, is what happens when your strategy becomes synonymous with cost-saving and efficiency; first you define a hotel doorman’s role as ‘opening the door’, then you replace his role with an automatic door-opening mechanism.
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The problem arises because opening the door is only the notional role of a doorman; his other, less definable sources of value lie in a multiplicity of other functions, in addition to door-opening: taxi-hailing, security, vagrant discouragement, customer recognition, as well as in signalling the status of the hotel. The doorman may actually increase what you can charge for a night’s stay in your hotel.
When every function of a business is looked at from the same narrow economic standpoint, the same game is applied endlessly. Define something narrowly, automate or streamline it – or remove it entirely – then regard the savings as profit.
...
[Moi ici: Recordar quando falo dos Muggles e daqueles que não nutrem relações de amor com clientes, produtos e serviços] Today, the principal activity of any publicly held company is rarely the creation of products to satisfy a market need. Management attention is instead largely directed towards the invention of plausible-sounding efficiency narratives to satisfy financial analysts, many of whom know nothing about the businesses they claim to analyse, beyond what they can read on a spreadsheet. There is no need to prove that your cost-saving works empirically, as long as it is consistent with standard economic theory. It is a simple principle of business that, however badly your decision turns out, you will never be fired for following economics, even though its predictive value lies somewhere between water divining and palmistry.”

Trechos retirados de "Alchemy: Or, the Art and Science of Conceiving Effective Ideas That Logical People Will Hate" de Rory Sutherland.

Portefolio de projectos de melhoria

Interessante este trecho:

"Providers resisted the notion that successful continuous-improvement strategies in other hospital units would work in theirs, so we quickly realized that name-dropping Toyota and the Cleveland Clinic would only compound resistance to change.
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To alter this mindset, we focused on isolating and solving a problem in their unit. Showing the problem exists in a team’s day-to-day setting fuels conversations that lead to change and makes them less likely to jettison the initiative amid a leadership change. In this case, the renal transplant team was able to reduce readmissions by 9% over nine months in 2017 and continued to improve even after the clinic’s medical director departed. This success inspired other teams at the medical center to study and change their own processes."

Actualmente a implementar um sistema de gestão ambiental numa metalomecânica, optámos por concentrar o esforço inicial de implementação no desenvolvimento de alguns projectos:

• Melhorar o tratamento dos resíduos 
• Prevenir, responder e simular resposta a fugas e derrames
• Regularizar a captação de água
• Regularizar as emissões
• Controlar o ruído

Um pouco na linha da sugestão da ISO 14005:2019.

Trecho inicial retirado de "Creating a Culture of Continuous Improvement"

Connected companies

"The Old ApproachCompanies used to interact with customers only episodically, when customers came to them.
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The New ApproachToday, thanks to new technologies, companies can address customers’ needs the moment they arise—and sometimes even earlier. With connected strategies, firms can build deeper ties with customers and dramatically improve their experiences.
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The UpshotCompanies need to make continuous connection a fundamental part of their business models. They can do so with four strategies: respond to desire, curated offering, coach behavior, and automatic execution.
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A seismic shift is under way. Thanks to new technologies that enable frequent, low-friction, customized digital interactions, companies today are building much deeper ties with customers than ever before. Instead of waiting for customers to come to them, firms are addressing customers’ needs the moment they arise—and sometimes even earlier. It’s a win-win: Through what we call connected strategies, customers get a dramatically improved experience, and companies boost operational efficiencies and lower costs.
...
In our research we’ve identified four effective connected strategies, each of which moves beyond traditional modes of customer interaction and represents a fundamentally new business model. We call them respond to desire, curated offering, coach behavior, and automatic execution."

Trechos retirados de "The Age of Continuous Connection"

Desafios

"When setting team goals, many managers feel that they must maintain a tricky balance between setting targets high enough to achieve impressive results and setting them low enough to keep the troops happy. But the assumption that employees are more likely to welcome lower goals doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. In fact, our research indicates that in some situations people perceive higher goals as easier to attain than lower ones — and even when that’s not the case, they still can find those more challenging goals more appealing."

Trecho retirado de "Why You Should Stop Setting Easy Goals"

"Variety isn’t infinitely valuable"

"Seeing this ever-expanding variety and choice as advantageous to consumers is tempting. The economic theory that governs many Americans’ understanding of consumer choice posits that a free, competitive market should drive down prices on the best-quality stuff. But in the arms race to sell as many sandwich bags or beach towels as possible, a problem has become clear: Variety isn’t infinitely valuable.
...
Those infinite, meaningless options can result in something like a consumer fugue state.
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For a relatively new class of consumer-products start-ups, there’s another method entirely. Instead of making sense of a sea of existing stuff, these companies claim to disrupt stuff as Americans know it. Casper (mattresses), Glossier (makeup), Away (suitcases), and many others have sprouted up to offer consumers freedom from choice: The companies have a few aesthetically pleasing and supposedly highly functional options, usually at mid-range prices. They’re selling nice things, but maybe more importantly, they’re selling a confidence in those things, and an ability to opt out of the stuff rat race."

Trechos retirados de "There Is Too Much Stuff"

Don’t design for average

“Don’t design for average.
Metrics, and especially averages, encourage you to focus on the middle of a market, but innovation happens at the extremes. You are more likely to come up with a good idea focusing on one outlier than on ten average users.”

Trechos retirados de "Alchemy: Or, the Art and Science of Conceiving Effective Ideas That Logical People Will Hate" de Rory Sutherland.

Uma revolução que vai ter de acontecer

A propósito disto "Tight job market squeezing smallest businesses":

"Low unemployment and rising wages are creating hiring challenges for companies of all sizes. There were 7.5 million unfilled jobs on the last business day of March, according to the Labor Department.
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Smaller businesses often experience lower job growth, but they seem to be having a particularly tough time adding workers in today’s job market."

Recordar o impacte sobre o aumento dos salários desligado do aumento da produtividade e da inevitável destruição de empresas incapazes de subirem na escala de valor a uma velocidade adequada:

• Como aumentar a facturação quando não se pode aumentar a produção por falta de pessoas? (parte IV)
• "Espero que não vos tremam as pernas quando as empresas começarem a cair como tordos"

Nos próximos anos vai haver muito pranto e ranger de dentes da parte dos empresários com o locus de controlo no exterior.

"fabulously efficient"

Há dias num programa na TV cabo onde dois indivíduos percorrem a América profunda em busca de antiguidades, um deles delirou ao encontrar os restos de uma bicicleta de 1880. Isso foi motivo para passarem imagens de marcas de bicicletas dos nos 20 e 30 do século passado. Nessas imagens o que mais me marcou foi a muita preocupação com o design e a pouca preocupação com a eficiência pura e dura.

“Likewise it is absurd for the French to have so many local varieties of cheese, and yet this variety and scarcity seems to add to our pleasure. Contrast it with the US cheese industry thirty years ago – which was fabulously efficient and centred on a small number of states. In the 1990s there seemed to be only two varieties of cheese, a yellow one and an orange one, and neither was much good. Similarly, before the recent revolution in craft beer, the range and quality of American beer was dismal; however, since American brewing has become magnificently diverse and inefficient, the US has gone from being the worst country for a beer drinker to visit, to the best.”

Recordar estes delírios.

Considerar este título "Consumo de cerveja artesanal bate recordes".

"Diversificação da oferta agrada aos portugueses, que são os principais consumidores fora de casa na Europa.
...
entre abril de 2017 e abril de 2019, as vendas desta categoria de cervejas cresceram 88% em valor e 112% em quantidade, num mercado global que evoluiu 8% em valor e 5% em quantidade, no mesmo período. Considerado apenas o último ano, o acréscimo foi de 10% em valor e 15% em quantidade, três a cinco vezes mais do que os 3% do mercado total de cervejas."

Pensar na race-to-the-bottom entre cervejeiras industriais que julgam que o preço e a eficiência são tudo. E como não recuar a Loulé em Novembro de 2007?

Trechos retirados de "Alchemy: Or, the Art and Science of Conceiving Effective Ideas That Logical People Will Hate" de Rory Sutherland.

Mongo e magia (parte VII)

Parte I , parte II, parte III, parte IV, parte V e parte VI.

“GPS devices know everything about what they know and nothing about anything else.
...
The reason we don’t always behave in a way which corresponds with conventional ideas of rationality is not because we are silly: it is because we know more than we know we know.
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The trouble with market research is that people don’t think what they feel, they don’t say what they think, and they don’t do what they say.’ Trivers and Kurzban explained the evolutionary science behind that conundrum: we simply don’t have access to our genuine motivations, because it is not in our interest to know.
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Evolution does not care about objectivity – it only cares about fitness.
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If it helps us to perceive the world in a distorted fashion, then evolution will limit our objectivity. The standard, naïve view, as Trivers observes, is to assume that evolution has given us senses which deliver an accurate view of the world. However, evolution cares nothing for accuracy and objectivity: it cares about fitness.
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For a business to be truly customer-focused, it needs to ignore what people say. Instead it needs to concentrate on what people feel."

Trechos retirados de "Alchemy: Or, the Art and Science of Conceiving Effective Ideas That Logical People Will Hate" de Rory Sutherland.

Operacionalizar uma estratégia

Uma estratégia, qualquer que ela seja, não passa de uma ideia. Para que tenha algum impacte numa organização tem de ser traduzida em acção.

Acção significa saber: o que fazer; por quem, até quando, com que recursos.

Ou seja, a estratégia tem de ser operacionalizada em actividades muito concretas, muito específicas.

“1. Selecting existing capabilities that need to be enhanced and/or new capabilities that need to be introduced into the sourcing, operations and selling activities
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2. Identifying enabling practices that will help and support the development of the required capabilities; the practices will affect the structure, systems and culture of the business
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3. Developing specific initiatives to install those practices and to directly build the required capabilities
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4. Moving from initiatives into actions that directly impact the system. These actions must also generate feedback to enable us to track the effects of the changes introduced.
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This last step is critical: if there is no change in what people actually do, the strategy process will have no positive impact on the system.
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A clearly stated competitive strategy can build a coherent collective intention, which can help to integrate the efforts of all the members of the firm.”

Recordar:

• BSC numa IPSS (parte VI) (Julho de 2014)
• Transformar uma empresa de forma alinhada com a estratégia (parte VIII) (Agosto de 2018)

Imagem e trechos retirados de “What's Your Competitive Advantage?” de Paul Raspin

Ecosystem marketing

"In essence, ecosystem marketing is about understanding the market as a network of participants and being able to influence the right actors at the right time.
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Companies used to last 75 years.  Now the average company dies or disappears in 15 years.
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Companies die for a number of reasons.  One growing reason is that the company’s leaders do not understand the ecosystem that supports the company.
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Ecosystem marketing is the process of positioning your idea, message or product in the right ecosystems to gain visibility, engage prospects, capture attention, and create customers.  It is the process of discovering, analyzing, understanding, and taking marketing actions – in four distinct yet interrelated ecosystems:
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Company,
Competitor,
Category, and
Customer.
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Company ecosystems are defined as the digital neighborhood in which your business is located to include your partners, suppliers, and distributors. It is your business ecosystem.
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An economic community supported by a foundation of interacting organizations and individuals—the organisms of the business world. The economic community produces goods and services of value to customers, who are themselves members of the ecosystem. The member organisms also include suppliers, lead producers, competitors, and other stakeholders. Over time, they coevolve their capabilities and roles, and tend to align themselves with the directions set by one or more central companies."

Trechos retirados de "“Ecosystem Marketing: The Future of Competition” – Christian Sarkar and Philip Kotler"