"Jobs are increasingly viewed as undifferentiated and interchangeable across humans and machines — the very definition of a commodity.
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Outsourcing — exchanging internal employees for external ones, often offshore — was a big step toward commoditization for many companies.[Moi ici: Mentalidade anglo-saxónica no seu pior, o foco nos custos acima de tudo e, passar ao lado das oportunidades dos nichos e da proximidade]
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Just as there are low-value and high-value commodities, there are low-value and high-value commoditized jobs.
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For many jobs, the value is driven less by their intrinsic worth but rather by market demand. A recent Bloomberg Businessweek visual analytic suggests that jobs that disappeared in the first four months of 2017 compared with the same period in 2016 were not lost to automation, but were lost because fewer customers wanted to buy the products and services they produce.
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For many organizations today, the next big driver of job commoditization is automation driven by smart machines. Simply put, if a job is viewed as a commodity, it won’t be long before it is automated. My research on automation through artificial intelligence (AI) or cognitive technologies suggests that if a job can be outsourced, many of the tasks typically performed by the jobholder can probably be automated — even by relatively “dumb” technologies like robotic process automation. Many global outsourcers are working desperately to create their own automation capabilities that could replace human jobs with machines.
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The key for financial professionals and other workers whose jobs have traditionally seemed safe is to make themselves less commodity-like. Automation is a game of large numbers, and it’s not economical to automate unique activities. [Moi ici: Mongo é um mundo de "large numbers"?] As long as human workers’ capabilities are differentiated from machines’ capabilities, then machines can’t easily replace them — and few organizations will be tempted to automate that niche."
"Antes de me sentar a citar este texto dei uma caminhada de 5km por ruas secundárias de Mafamude que não visitava desde 1973. A certa altura olho para uma série de "lojas": uma de imobiliário, uma híbrida entre a mercearia e a chinesa, uma como ginásio de educação, outra de ... e veio-me à mente o pensamento de que reconheceremos Mongo quando começarem a aparecer nos espaços de loja: unidades de fabricação com 2 ou 3 trabalhadores e tecnologia."Agora encontro:
"The Garment District is no different; it is an industrial zone, with other nonindustrial uses allowed. But since fashion is a lighter industry, like other niche design-driven industries, it is actually clean and quiet and can be easily integrated with office and residential uses in the same buildings. [Moi ici: E o que é Mongo senão um paradigma de empresas dedicadas a servir nichos?] What if the higher-value residential tenants could consciously support the lower-rent garment tenants (or other light manufacturing spaces) through cross-subsidies? The result would be a diverse mix of making, selling, playing, and living; creating a 24/7 work-live community. The ground floor could remain retail space relating to the supplies that comprise the products—buttons, zippers, sequins, fabrics—while the lower and middle floors, where the showrooms are often located, would be required to be maintained as factories. The upper floors could contain the higher-value showrooms, and commercial and residential units.Afinal não é uma loucura de anónimo da província, se calhar é uma tendência a considerar para a cidade do futuro.
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Another approach is to make the garment workers visible, injecting energy into the area with new physical transparency, exposing the industrial mysteries of workers making patterns, cutting, sewing, and pleating fabrics, in what I call the “consumption of production.” The emergence of industry-as-spectacle combines retail with making, so that the consumer also can see into the process from beginning to end, in our experience economy. This would be part of a longtime tradition of urban merchants and their workshops, or even the phenomenon of open kitchens in restaurants, and follows new interests in authenticity. In this new context, it combines another hybrid of retail-factory spaces for urban chocolatiers, coffee roasters, and bakers bringing street life to cities. In doing so, we can redefine and bolster the dynamism and diversity of our innovative and productive city."
"One is the notion of reshoring: some Western manufacturers are “bringing manufacturing back home,” but our understanding of why exactly this occurs is limited.
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Location decisions must be understood not just through the lens of economic attractiveness of one region or country over another, but also as a decision where many organizational and technological interdependencies become relevant: decisions about where to locate manufacturing link to other decisions, such as location of research and development activities with other value chain activities and actors, such as product development, suppliers, and markets.
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When and why should policy makers be interested in production location decisions? Understanding value creation is central to understanding the role of production both within a firm and within a national economy.
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Our results suggest that contemporary location decisions link intimately to three dimensions of interdependence with suppliers, market, and development activities: formalization, coupling, and specificity.
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...Mongo implica mais proximidade e interacção com clientes e fornecedores, e maior rapidez na evolução da produção e do desenvolvimento.
we find the proposition that coupling is the most important source of interdependence in location decisions plausible. Specifically, if production is tightly coupled with development, relocating one implies relocating the other. In contrast, low formalization of the Production- Development Dyad may make it easier to manage the relationship if the two activities are geographically collocated, but coordination can succeed even without collocation as well.
We also observe that the common denominator in the cases where production takes place only in the low-cost country is high formalization combined with low specificity. This is not surprising: It is specifically the routinized, generic forms of production that become candidates for both outsourcing and offshoring.
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In our analysis of the 35 location decisions, the key theme that repeated itself throughout the cases was the notion of interdependence of activities. As a general finding, this is hardly surprising, but the detailed understanding of how formalization, specificity, and coupling link to location decisions has the potential to both inform firm-level strategies and to at least introduce new vocabulary into discussions of economic policy."
"Overproduction is a huge problem that the industry tries to hide as it chases after fake numbers and reports of constant growth.
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The industry talks about conspicuous consumption — buying for the sake of buying — as the reason behind the growth in the luxury segment. But brands are producing more product than there is demand for. I call it conspicuous production, producing for the sake of producing and artificially inflating the numbers.
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Supply meets demand is the basic rule of business and one the whole industry seems to ignore. Sales are the first indicators of overproduction. The goal should be to reach 100 per cent sell-through before discounts, though figures over 90 per cent are acceptable, as no one can predict the exact demand down to each SKU [stock-keeping unit]. What’s shocking is that most brands in big stores don’t even sell 20 per cent of their merchandise before discount, yet continue to report wholesale growth.
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Stores and brands are trying to hide the truth by opening outlet stores, which sell unsold merchandise and sometimes even similar collections that never went to the full-price retailers. Outlet stores then have the same problem: they end up with deadstock that they resell to other countries and the same scenario repeats itself. If nobody wanted something full-price, it doesn’t necessarily mean that anyone will want it half-price. Recent reports show that more than 30 per cent of merchandise produced by fashion brands will never be sold. The clothes end up in landfill. It affects consumer buying behaviour as well. Pieces bought on discount appear to be less valuable psychologically to the consumer, which makes it easier to throw them out.
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Luxury is like dating. If something is available and in front of you, it’s less desirable. Scarcity is what defines it. One of the ways to create scarcity is to reduce the supply curve. The more demand there is, the more desire it creates. Desire is the key value in luxury business.
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The parallel market is one of the dirtiest secrets of the fashion industry. [Moi ici: Outro tema de que me falaram na conversa na origem de "Em busca de um novo oásis"] More and more luxury stores have become a beautiful façade to cover the real business going on behind the scenes. In addition to selling a small part of the merchandise directly to the final consumer, they also play an intermediary role in reselling the biggest part of their order to horrible stores, often in remote locations all around the world, which cannot get brands through the official channels.
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Brands are perfectly aware of the parallel market, and the stores involved in it, but are closing their eyes in order to further report growing sales numbers. Officially those brands are sold only in the best stores in the world, and claim a limited and exclusive distribution, but in reality their merchandise ends up in horrible places. There is a certain obsession with reporting the growth for fashion brands no matter what the true cost.
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The values and goals have mutated so much that things that simply make sense start to look abnormal or disruptive. Historically, brands produced clothes to sell to a final consumer. Today brands produce runway collections to sell a perfume or a wallet in a duty-free store. They stuff stores with unwanted merchandise to report artificial growth. They keep overproducing while talking about sustainability. They claim exclusive distribution while paralleling their own merchandise. They are slowly killing their brands in the long term to have a quick profit today."
"they chose to shoot their designs on local people and families living in the area"Com este outro artigo "QUORA: IS VICTORIA'S SECRET FAILING? IT'S NOT LOOKING GOOD":
"The first clear indication that it’s the perfection in Victoria’s Secret images that is proving to be a turnoff was the emergence of competitor Aerie, whose marketing plays up its “unretouched, real women” angle. Ever since it launched its no-airbrushing policy in 2014, Aerie’s sales have taken off.Autenticidade versus "fake"
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As a policy, Curvy Kate does not use any professional models, sourcing the eclectic mix of women it features from social media.
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Also going the real-women, no-Photoshopping route and winning reams of positive reviews is LONELY LINGERIE, which a few months ago placed a 56-year-old woman at the centre of their campaign."
"O conhecimento técnico, a aposta, constante, na qualidade, nos detalhes e no estabelecimento de “relações de confiança e de transparência” têm sido os grandes pilares de desenvolvimento da Impetus no mundo. A par da inovação. O grupo conta já com vários produtos patenteados e linhas específicas para desporto, com tecnologia que regula a humidade e transpiração, além das gamas Innovation (linha que armazena o calor corporal excessivo e volta a distribuí-lo em caso de necessidade, uma tecnologia desenvolvida pela NASA para os astronautas), Thermo (para proteger do frio, no inverno) e ProtectDry (roupa interior para incontinentes, lavável e reutilizável, e com tecnologia que elimina odores). Este último é um produto que está a ser vendido, em força, na grande distribuição, com destaque para Portugal, Espanha, Suíça, Alemanha, EUA e Suécia e com entrada, em breve, na Rússia e na África do Sul.Recordar:
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O Citeve e a Universidade do Minho são parceiros de excelência em I&D. Recentemente, chegou ao mercado a linha de roupa interior com certificado orgânico, que garante um fabrico socialmente sustentável e sem uso de químicos.
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O objetivo é o aumento da capacidade produtiva por via da aquisição de novos equipamentos, alguns dos quais completamente inovadores no país
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A consolidação de mercados é a grande prioridade da Impetus, que exporta 98% do que produz, com especial destaque para mercados como Espanha, França, México, Japão, Estados Unidos, Alemanha, Suíça e Noruega, estes últimos em regime de subcontratação para outras marcas, o chamado private label, caso da Calvin Klein ou da Tommy Hilfiger, entre muitos outros. A marca própria vale 25%.
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Mas o private label, mesmo incerto, é o que nos tem mantido até aos dias de hoje."
"Brexit, we were told, will improve Britain’s trade performance through the depreciation of sterling.Interessante mesmo era alguém pegar neste artigo do FT e com ar de ingénuo chegar junto do bicicletas, ou de Ferreira do Amaral, ou de Vítor Bento, e pedir uma explicação para esta "blasfémia" de exportações que crescem com moeda a fortalecer.
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The big difference is currency movements. Sterling has fallen 17 per cent since late 2015 against Britain’s trading partners, a period in which the equivalent measure for Portugal rose 2 per cent. With such stark exchange rate differences, it would be natural to see net trade — exports minus imports — contributing more to Britain’s growth rate than that in Portugal over the past year. UK imports have become pricier and exports more competitive.
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But in most recent data comprising the year to the first quarter of 2017, net trade subtracted 0.2 percentage points from the UK’s growth rate while adding 0.5 percentage points to Portugal’s rate. Sterling’s slide has not helped Britain.
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Between January and March this year UK output in production industries expanded 2.3 per cent compared with a year earlier, the same rate as the growth in services and less than in construction. British rebalancing towards production is notable for its absence. In Portugal, industrial output grew 4.8 per cent over the same period, considerably faster than the 2.8 per cent overall growth rate. Brexit has not given the UK a more balanced economy.
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Surely, at least, the Leave vote has spurred UK companies to broaden their horizons and focus exports outside the EU? Again, no. With the depreciation allowing exporters to raise prices, British export values to the EU27 were 15.5 per cent higher in the year to the first quarter, a more rapid improvement than the 13.8 per cent growth rate to non-EU countries. But compared with Portugal, these figures look disappointing; over the same period its exports to outside the EU grew 33.2 per cent with a 51.6 per cent rise in US exports.
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These are the sort of numbers that would have Brexiters salivating, if they related to Britain rather than Portugal."
"With improvements in living standards and a transformation in people’s ideas of consumption, much of the current electronics manufacturing industry is confronted with market demands characterized by variety and volume fluctuation. Manufacturing system flexibility is useful to address such fluctuated market demands.Anónimo da província mas muito à frente:
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Seru production has been called beyond lean in Japan and can be considered to be an ideal manufacturing mode to realize mass customization
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seru production relies on low-cost automation and has little automation. When reconfiguring a conveyor assembly line into serus, expensive large automated equipment is substituted with simple-structure equipment with similar functions. The reconstructed equipment can be easily duplicated and modified at a low cost, so as to avoid equipment-sharing conflicts among multiple serus and reduce investment in equipment.
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Factories that produce multiple electronics product types in small-lot batches tend to adopt seru production. Compared to mass production, which displays its superiority in the case of a narrow range of product types with high product volumes, seru production would be affected by low efficiency and high cost in such an environment.
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Using highly automated production systems, mass production factories can attain high production efficiency. However, they usually achieve low production flexibility. As both the variety and volume fluctuations of market demands increase, mass production factories may need to reconfigure their traditional conveyor assembly lines for their survival and development.
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Seru production is human-centered manufacturing. Multiskilled operators are important resources to implement seru production, more important than in mass production. The equipment used in seru production is simple and not automated. The effect and influence of equipment on the performance of seru production systems is less than that on mass production systems. Accordingly, a practical production planning system for seru production should consider multiskilled operators more than equipment. In a dynamically changing manufacturing environment, a dynamic production planning system is needed"
"all of them into this niche product that acts as a social identifier. For them, standing in line for a T-shirt or baseball cap is a way of telling the world that you know about something that not everyone is hip to.
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“We become a little band of survivors, with a grim gallows humor to match,” Mr. Andrews wrote. “We’re all in this together.”"
"The alternate to costly multipurpose or special-order machines is inexpensive, slower, and fewer-purpose machines, but many of them. Every work cell that needs one gets one and can then function autonomously. Although a multipurpose machine offers high flexibility through quick changeover and rapid production rate, all else equal, conventional fewer-purpose machines might provide even greater flexibility when employed in a number of manufacturing cells. Conventional machines are also simpler to operate and less costly to maintain.”[Moi ici: Pode estar aqui uma oportunidade para os fabricantes portugueses de máquinas?]Trechos retirados de "Missing link in competitive manufacturing research and practice: Customer-responsive concurrent production" publicado por Journal of Operations Management 49-51 (2017) 83-87
Constraining that three-pronged potential, however, is the tendency of manufacturers to retain SP practices in spite of their limited responsiveness. Such dysfunctional decision making ... tends to be chosen for local efficiency rather than effectiveness - remains in force today.
Several authors emphasize the importance of avoiding monument equipment consider the potentially negative impact on responsiveness of smoothing the production schedule as commonly
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concurrent production relies on multiple, relatively slow-paced, simple, small-footprint, low-cost productive units, sometimes referred to as right-sized
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As the number of production units increases, so does the degree to which production becomes concurrent with demand; and as the degree to which equipment units are dedicated increases, so does concurrency.
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“Abolish the Setup,” points to the liabilities of “a single, expensive machine that can produce many kinds of parts,” compared with several less-expensive, dedicated machines.
Small, inexpensive units of capacity can be readily reconfigured, which grows in importance as customer preferences proliferate.
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CP builds factory infrastructures around multiple product-family or customer-family-focused units - cells, machines, production lines, plants-in-a-plant - with simple, compact, low- cost, “right-sized” equipment and avoidance of monument-sized equipment. The primary objectives of CP are to reduce customer lead times and distribution inventories. Longer-range benefits to the organization as a whole include better customer retention, market penetration, and sales growth. In an era when customers increasingly demand higher variety from manufacturers, CP is timely, making it possible to reap the benefits of responsiveness while keeping production costs low enough for competitiveness."
"As marcas já ñ querem vender só um produto. Querem vender um propósito"— Carlos P da Cruz (@ccz1) August 3, 2017
IMHO ñ é bem isto.
Creio q é +: Querem associar-se a 1 propósito
"Portugal está a perder terreno face a Itália no que à produção e exportação de calçado diz respeito.Quando li este trecho, meio a correr, pensei logo na evolução do perfil da produção portuguesa como forma de justificar esta evolução. Recordar a série "Comparações enganadoras"
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é no preço médio que a diferença se acentua: 26,09 dólares por par, pouco mais de metade dos 47,76 euros a que são exportados os sapatos italianos."
"no calçado de couro, o fosso face a Itália agravou-se: os sapatos italianos de couro são exportados, em média, a 63,78 dólares, mais 2,28 dólares do que em 2015, enquanto os portugueses não vão além dos 31,16 dólares, praticamente o mesmo valor do ano anterior."Como é que o artigo explica esta evolução?
"“uma parte significativa do diferencial de preços” é explicado pelo facto de Itália ter uma posição muito superior à portuguesa nos mercados extracomunitários, que registam, habitualmente, preços médios de exportação superiores aos europeus."Esta explicação parece-me tão simplista...
"A evolução do retalho é um tema que me interessa porque é super importante para as PME com que trabalho. A maioria das PME portuguesas não tem marca própria relevante. Ou produzem para marcas de outros ou produzem componentes que serão incorporados nas marcas de outros (B2B2C ou B2B2B2C).A revolução do retalho tradicional disrupciona as cadeias de fabrico.
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Assim, o seu futuro depende em larga escala, segundo o modelo de negócio actual, do sucesso da última interacção da cadeia, aquele ...B2C. Se esta última interacção falhar, tal como falharam em massa as sapatarias de rua quando chegaram os centros comerciais, as nossas PME terão um problema em mãos."
"O regresso da produção industrial à Europa vai voltar a colocar em cima da mesa a hipótese de apostar no low-cost. E o low-cost parece tão intuitivo, tão atraente..."Ainda esta semana um empresário me contava que um seu cliente tinha recebido um encomenda muito grande de meios de produção para o fabrico de calçado. Algo que relacionei com uma visita de há alguns meses de alguém que procurava empregas muito grandes em Portuga para produzir calçado.
"The manufacturing arm of operations management (OM) has limited itself to a narrow vision of what this key organizational function is supposed to be and do. OM scholars have quibbled about efficiency in factory and supply-chain operations, while giving little attention to tying production forward to end customers. Our view is that this single-minded focus on efficiency has effectively knocked OM research, theory, topics, methods, measures, and practitioner guidance off kilter.Agora metam neste cenário os fanáticos da automatização que só pensam no eficientismo e se esquecem de Mongo: rapidez, flexibilidade e variedade crescente para servir tribos cada vez mais exigentes.
On the industry side, a narrow view of OM mirrors the single- minded focus that we observe in academia. Manufacturers proudly display factories that have been cleared of targeted wastes and are marvels of short flow times, low work-in-process in- ventories, and high capacity utilization. They may also point to similar achievements with key suppliers. A closer look, however, often reveals a supply chain with extended lead times [Moi ici: Aposto que, como eu, não sabia que o Toyota Production System, essa maravilha de organização e eficiência (sem ironia) congela a previsão de produção com 8 semanas de antecedência] and swollen finished-goods inventories that dwarf the low in-plant inventories. The overall supply chain often loses the ability to compete on anything except cost. The resulting vulnerability to low-cost competition leads to offshoring.
Inability to synchronize with downstream demand increases production cost through supply-demand mismatches, delays in addressing quality issues - even mass product recalls, and customer defections. These negative outcomes are commonplace even in factories held up as bastions of “best practices”.
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A major deterrent to CP [Moi ici: Concurrent production] adoption is the tendency both in companies and among the OM academic community to focus on localized efficiency to the neglect of responsiveness in fulfilling customer needs. Manufacturing people have limited interaction with final users, so the cost of valuing efficiency above responsiveness goes unnoticed. In consequence, manufacturing-improvement efforts tend to be limited to pursuit of within-factory efficiencies: short internal flows, smoothed sched- ules, and high capacity utilization.
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manufacturers in their quest for operational efficiency prefer factory operatives to be always busy making products. CP, on the other hand, welcomes the situation in which both equipment and its operators are idle for lack of current demand.
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Another managerial mindset that hinders CP implementation is the assumption that it is better to reduce changeover times on a single piece of equipment than to duplicate that equipment. Along similar lines, we have seen manufacturers replacing multiple units with a single large, flexible piece of equipment. ... done for the sake of “... improved efficiency and productivity”. This way of thinking culminates in “monument” machines: high-speed, multi-functional equipment that gives the impression of being extremely efficient. ... that engineers “... typically think at the process level,” seeking efficiencies “... by combining operations with[in] a single piece of equipment.” This “can cause a disconnect with general management who want to increase sales, make gains in market share, or find new sources of revenue by adding product lines.”"
"I believe raising equity at the outset of a new venture’s journey is, at least most of the time, an exceedingly bad idea—for both entrepreneurs and investors alike.Não consigo deixar de pensar que o entrevistado, ao recomendar o livro de Mullins o fez com um sorriso maroto.
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[Moi ici: Segue-se um argumento que há anos uso no Twitter, sobre o tema] waiting to raise capital forces the entrepreneur’s atten- tion toward his or her customers, where it should be in the first place.
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making do with the probably modest amounts of cash your customers will give you enforces frugality, rather than waste. Having too much money can make you stupid and lets you ignore your customer! Having less money will make you smarter, and will force you to run your business better, too.
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focusing your efforts to raise cash from customers who are willing and eager to buy from your yet-unproven com- pany is likely to mercifully put to rest a half-baked or not- quite-right idea that requires more development—a pivot, in today’s entrepreneurial lexicon—in order to hit the mark.
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“We think that you shouldn’t start with the assumption that you need to raise money . . . Huge companies have been created with little or no outside investment.”
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- Raising capital demands a lot of time and energy, distracting entrepreneurs from building the actual business.
- Raising capital too early means pitching the merit of the business idea to potential investors, rather than proving its merit among customers in the marketplace."
"abandonar as referências mais básicas, [Moi ici: As que vendem pelo preço e requerem o custo mais baixo] estar atento às tendências do mercado e apostar numa oferta com mais valor acrescentado, [Moi ici: Subir na escala de valor. What else?]"
"At their worst, meetings are like short prison sentences that have you counting the minutes until your release. Yet there are meetings that are useful and productive, and even invigorating and enjoyable."Trecho retirado de "How to Craft Meetings People Love (Really)"
"a fase que se seguiu, entre 2012 e 2015, coincidiu com o início da recuperação dos salários reais e com o crescimento da competitividade e da produtividade na generalidade dos setores. Este novo círculo virtuoso foi impulsionado principalmente pelo lado da procura da economia, uma vez que a faturação das sociedades teve o seu maior crescimento entre 2012 e 2015. O volume de negócios cresceu 12,1% nas indústrias transformadoras, 11,8% nos outros serviços e 9,5% no comércio."O texto refere "recuperação de salários reais" eu escreveria aumento dos salários reais já que estamos a falar de empresas privadas e empresas transformadoras.
"A Elis opera no aluguer e manutenção de roupa de cama, de cozinha e para casa-de-banho, de utensílios de limpeza para casa-de-banho, dispensadores de água e de tapetes e na personalização de fardas de trabalho para os sectores da hotelaria e restauração, saúde, indústria, comércio e serviços."Tudo é serviço!
"Maite, que chegou de Espanha há poucos dias, aplaude a ideia de descobrir o mundo da vinicultura sozinha. “Despertou-me os sentidos e acho que não me escapou nada do museu, onde posso mexer, tocar e até cheirar caixas perfumadas de amora, framboesa ou baunilha, numa mesa para também adivinhar qual o aroma”, diz. Segue logo, sem demora, para a próxima descoberta: desde a vindima na adega, passando pela fermentação até ao envelhecimento e engarrafamento. Mais à frente, uma mostra do solo de xisto e argila do Douro chama-lhe a atenção que, de seguida, salta para as caixas de luz que exploram as tipologias de vinho do Porto — Branco, Ruby, Tawny e Rosé — com a respectiva evolução da tonalidade. E um questionário interactivo pergunta-lhe “Qual é o seu Porto?” para depois lhe enviar um rótulo personalizado com uma sugestão."
"Jorge Coelho quer aprovar, até ao fim deste mês, a construção de um novo aeroporto de Lisboa na Ota."Lembram-se da urgência da construção? A Portela estava a abarrotar e não aguentaria muito mais tempo.
"O aeroporto de Lisboa, agora designado Aeroporto Humberto Delgado, foi dos hubs que mais cresceu em todo o Mundo nos últimos dez anos,"Cresceu 176%!!!
"seru highlights the need to define productivity more specifically in terms of value creation, rather than output. Elaborating the definition of produc- tivity and the TSEF in this way provides insight into why and how production operations deploying seru have been competitive in spite of high labor and other costs."Posso ser um anónimo da província mas ando muito, muito à frente. Perdoem-me a falta de modéstia.
"In 1969, manufacturing strategy pioneer Wickham Skinner wrote about the missing link between an organization's strategy and its operations. In this provocative Forum essay, Richard Schon- berger and Karen Brown argue that this gap is still very much a reality in that both academics and practitioners tend to subscribe to an overly narrow view of operations. [Moi ici: Aquilo a que este anónimo da província chama de mentalidade da tríade, demasiada concentração na eficiência] In a nutshell, there is still too much focus on efficiency.Antes de me sentar a citar este texto dei uma caminhada de 5km por ruas secundárias de Mafamude que não visitava desde 1973. A certa altura olho para uma série de "lojas": uma de imobiliário, uma híbrida entre a mercearia e a chinesa, uma como ginásio de educação, outra de ... e veio-me à mente o pensamento de que reconheceremos Mongo quando começarem a aparecer nos espaços de loja: unidades de fabricação com 2 ou 3 trabalhadores e tecnologia.
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an excessive focus on costs effectively transforms cost into the default competitive priority. A case in point: why do we speak and write about “low-cost environments”? Why is one particular performance dimension privileged like this in our conversations about the geography of manufacturing? Has anyone ever written about “high-responsiveness environments”? Why not?
The task of the operations function is often taken as a given and unchanging. But, in uncertain environments, both task and its boundary conditions change over time e static and dynamic efficiency are very different things. Like Skinner wrote on multiple occasions throughout his career, we must not conceive of operations as a perfunctory task e an immediate candidate for outsourcing and offshoring. Rather, it often belongs to the organizational and strategic core of the firm, and as such must remain strategically relevant over time. If the objective is to remain in sync with changing markets, outsourcing and offshoring may well be the worst decision imaginable."
"Espero que isto não chegue cá, espero que alguém ande a preparar os alarmes e as trancas antes de chegarem os ladrões, "European Commission Publishes Xylella Fastidiosa Factsheet"."
"a JTBD describes how a customer changes or wishes to change. With this in mind, we define a JTBD as follows:
A Job to be Done is the process a consumer goes through whenever she evolves herself through searching for, buying, and using a product.
It begins when the customer becomes aware of the possibility to evolve.
It continues as along as the desired progress is sought.
It ends when the consumer realizes new capabilities and behaves differently, or abandons the idea of evolving.
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A consumer goes along his life as he’s come to know it. Then things change. He is presented with an opportunity for self-betterment — that is, make changes so he can grow. When or if he finds a product that helps him realize that growth opportunity, he can evolve to that better version of himself he had imagined."
"That mismatch has engendered a kind of schizophrenia in the way computer companies view their supply chains. They cling to measures of physical efficiency such as plant capacity utilization and inventory turns because those measures are familiar from their mainframe days. Yet the marketplace keeps pulling them toward measures of responsiveness such as product availability.
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There is a kind of schizophrenia in the way computer companies view their supply chains.
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How does a company in the upper right-hand cell overcome its schizophrenia? Either by moving to the left on the matrix and making its products functional or by moving down the matrix and making its supply chain responsive. The correct direction depends on whether the product is sufficiently innovative to generate enough additional profit to cover the cost of making the supply chain responsive.
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A sure sign that a company needs to move to the left is if it has a product line characterized by frequent introductions of new offerings, great variety, and low profit margins. Toothpaste is a good example. A few years ago, I was to give a presentation to a food industry group. I decided that a good way to demonstrate the dysfunctional level of variety that exists in many grocery categories would be to buy one of each type of toothpaste made by a particular manufacturer and present the collection to my audience. When I went to my local supermarket to buy my samples, I found that 28 varieties were available. A few months later, when I mentioned this discovery to a senior vice president of a competing manufacturer, he acknowledged that his company also had 28 types of toothpaste—one to match each of the rival’s offerings.
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Does the world need 28 kinds of toothpaste from each manufacturer? Procter & Gamble, which has been simplifying many of its product lines and pricing, is coming to the conclusion that the answer is no. Toothpaste is a product category in which a move to the left—from innovative to functional—makes sense.[Moi ici: Um artigo escrito em 1997. Recordar a evolução para Mongo, cada vez mais gente fora da caixa. E para certas tribos isto é fundamental e não pactuam com a funcionalidade pura e simples]
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In other cases when a company has an unresponsive supply chain for innovative products, the right solution is to make some of the products functional and to create a responsive supply chain for the remaining innovative products."
"The typical seru implementation process can be summarized as follows:
1. As customer demands fluctuate, assembly line inefficiencies become apparent and a strategic choice to emphasize responsiveness is made.
2. Assembly lines are dismantled and replaced with divisional seru systems through resource collocation and removal/replacement, cross-training, and autonomy.
3. Expensive dedicated equipment is replaced by inexpensive general-purpose equipment that can be duplicated and redeployed as needed by serus.
4. As cross-training progresses, divisional serus evolve into rotating serus and yatais.
5. As the seru system matures, cell configurability is developed so that exactly the cells required to meet demand can be rapidly formed, then dismantled once demand is met.
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In the years leading up to 1992, production of most high- volume, low-value-added Japanese products was being shifted to low-cost countries because of the Japanese yen's sharp rise. Sony's products did not lend themselves to such offshoring, however, because they were characterized by high variety, low volume, and high value added, with frequent design updates and generational changes. Sony first attempted to respond to its high demand volatility by applying the Toyota Production System mixed-product method to its conveyor lines, but the demand volatility for Sony products substantially exceeded that of Toyota. Rapid changes in product technologies and configurations called for lines to be reconfigurable, whereas the Toyota Production System emphasized investments in expensive, synchronized, integrated production lines. Thus, Sony chose to design its production system to respond to demand volatility, rather than eliminate it as occurs under the Toyota Production System.
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Conveyers were replaced by workbenches, and simple equipment and manual tools were used, so that serus could be constructed, modified, dismantled, and reconstructed quickly and frequently. Although divisional serus were considerably more flexible than assembly lines with respect to product variation and volume changes, the demand for some products was volatile enough to require even more flexibility, so some of the divisional serus were converted into rotating serus.
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As product variants proliferate and product life-cycles shorten, needs for changeovers and transitions rise. In this case, assembly lines with highly specialized workers and equipment (and resulting costly and lengthy change- overs) are likely to struggle more and more to maintain acceptable levels of utilization (uptime). Given the need to meet these highly varying demands, seru systems actually produce swifter and more even flows than assembly lines, because they handle transitions more quickly and efficiently. The emphasis under seru that all tasks are completed in a single cell, all required resources are made available in the cell, and that everything not required is eliminated, has as its objective to support the swift and even flow of products."
"As long as competitive advantage is temporary, even the largest companies have to focus on serving customers in order to stay on top. But if the Blockbusters of the world are able to cement their status and no longer need to fear the Netflixes, customers, competitors, and society all stand to lose."Como não recordar o comboio de empresas do regime que o choque revelado em 2011 tem contribuído para aniquilar.
"The rate of new-product introductions has skyrocketed in many industries, fueled both by an increase in the number of competitors and by the efforts of existing competitors to protect or increase profit margins. As a result, many companies have turned or tried to turn traditionally functional products into innovative products. But they have continued to focus on physical efficiency in the processes for supplying those products. This phenomenon explains why one finds so many broken supply chains—or unresponsive chains trying to supply innovative products—in industries such as automobiles, personal computers, and consumer packaged goods.Trecho retirado de "What Is the Right Supply Chain for Your Product?"
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Functional products require an efficient process; innovative products, a responsive process."
"companies that weren’t born as platform businesses rarely realize that they can—at least partially—turn their products and services into an MSP (multisided platforms)"
"we define a lean operations strategy as one that prioritizes minimization of use of resources through reducing variability and minimizing buffers, and a responsive operations strategy as one that prioritizes the ability to respond to demand volatility (product and quantity), which then requires buffering either with capacity or inventory.
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Seru is a type of cellular manufacturing (CM).
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When demand is highly volatile, however, the value of smoothing demand tends to be lower than the value of responsiveness. Similarly, streamlining the operation of an assembly line through use of the takt time is possible when what is produced does not change, but a rapidly changing product mix eliminates such productivity gains. These practices are combined with the tradition within Toyota Production System of freezing the production schedule eight weeks before production begins, which substantially reduces responsiveness. Assembly lines organized according to Toyota Production System practices can be highly efficient when demand volatility is low. As demand volatility increases, however, assembly lines lack the needed responsiveness and lose the stability that is the source of their outstanding efficiency. Seru thus begins with the transformation of assembly lines into cells. Seru cells resemble biological cellular organisms in that they can be easily constructed, modified, dismantled, and reconstructed, hence the name seru, a Japanese word for cellular organism. In contrast to the fixed cells described elsewhere in the literature, seru cells are defined by their configurability, which plays a key role in their responsiveness. These assembly cells - designed to permit orders to flow seamlessly through the factory - represent a choice to prioritize responsiveness over efficiency.
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[Moi ici: O trecho que se segue é tremendo, quando eu falo de Mongo e muita gente fala de automação. Recordar: "Não acredito nestas relações simplistas" e "In principle, the production of virtually any component or assembly operation could be robotized and moved to high-wage countries—but only so long as demand is great enough, and design specifications stable enough, to justify huge scale and hundreds of millions, if not billions, in upfront investments."] When production is organized into a single assembly line, the cost of large-scale automation may be justified by efficiency gains. When demand volatility is high enough to warrant cellular manufacturing, large and costly automated equipment needs to be replaced by small, flexible, and relatively inexpensive equipment that can be duplicated as needed."
"Canon is also looking to boost productivity. Already, the company has seen great gains from "cell assembly," where small teams build products from start to finish rather than each worker repeatedly performing a single task on a long assembly line. Canon now has no assembly lines; it ditched the last of its 20 kilometers of conveyor belts in 2002, when a line making ink-jet printers in Thailand was shut down."Em 2010 no postal "Para quem se queixa da China... (parte IV)" escrevi:
""In the 21st century industry, all successful strategies rely on speed-to-market. Speed-to-market, in turn, can operate only where there exists trust, cooperation and collaboration between customer and supplier. To achieve this, we must change the very nature of our industry strategies." (Moi ici: e as fábricas conseguem guarnecer-se de talento para falarem como parceiros com as marcas e não como recebedoras de encomendas? E os fabricantes de máquinas conseguem agarrar a oportunidade de desenhar as máquinas que permitirão trabalhar com estas séries e frequências? E o lean aqui não será de muito uso, estamos a falar de uma nova organização da produção..."Agora, passados estes anos todos:
"The past three decades have witnessed waves of offshoring by manufacturers in developed countries pursuing low-cost sources of production. Companies like Canon and Sony provide exceptions to the popular offshoring trend. Recognizing that their markets required responsiveness that extended supply chains could not provide, these companies pioneered a production system known as seru that has made it possible to manufacture competitively and profitably in Japan.
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Producing locally has then strengthened their capacity to innovate. In ensuing years, hundreds of Japanese companies, especially electronics makers, have adopted seru, touting impressive benefits. The seru experience provides a useful lens for understanding how manufacturing can be competitive in a high-cost economy.
The seru production system is a type of cellular manufacturing that is distinguished first by the cells being configurable rather than fixed; and second by its use of cells for assembly, packaging, and testing rather than fabrication alone. Seru is defined by its prioritization of responsiveness over cost reduction in setting the firm's operations strategy.
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Seru was developed to cope with high demand volatility and short product life cycles. Innovative manufacturing firms face the challenge of being flexible enough to handle significant process and environment variabilities, yet efficient enough to produce at a competitive cost. A considerable literature suggests that efficient production is best achieved through lean manufacturing, which typically seeks to reduce buffers and to eliminate demand volatility.
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Interestingly, seru was explicitly developed as an alternative to the Toyota Production System (the precursor to lean). The developer of the seru concept - an expert in the Toyota Production System - concluded that implementing the Toyota Production System would not be appropriate in an innovative industry where the primary objective is to respond to demand volatility and fast product development cycles. Rather than adding agility to leanness ... seru begins with the objective of responsiveness: Seru's originators sought to achieve a smooth flow of a wide variety of products and volumes while using resources frugally."
"We took several trends as givens, so we could focus on the uncertainties on which the future of work depends. We identified four almost-inevitable forces:
1. An aging workforce;
2. The decline of “dynamism,” the movement of people
between jobs, firms, and places;
3. A societal shift to non-work income;
4. Growing geographic gaps.
By 2024, nearly one-quarter of the workforce is projected to be 55 or older — more than double the share in 1994.
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Accepting these economic trends as givens, our members then considered the most important uncertainties about the future. After initially considering 16 variables, we selected these two as most important:
1. the structure of work — will there be more “tasks” (a catchall including contracting, projects, the “gig economy,” and the like) or will work remain concentrated in traditionally structured jobs?
2. the effect of automation — will technological changes result in more or less work to go around?"
"an increase in variety was associated with an increase in sourcing complexity, and that an increase in sourcing complexity was associated with worsened coordination performance.Por isto é que em ambientes cada vez mais complexos os gigantes falham. Ninguém quer ser tratado como plancton.
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This paper focused specifically on the tension between scale and scope economies to suggest that the pursuit of economies of scale generates production rigidity, while pursuing downstream synergies through cross-selling creates organizational interdependencies and complexity. We also empirically explored product line extension — the purest form of firm scope expansion — to demonstrate that complexity- induced coordination burden may, indeed, reduce economies of scope.
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These results also extend recent attempts to conceptualize the locus and limitation of coordination in complex task systems. As complexity increases, these loci of coordination turn into organizational bottlenecks due to limits on their coordination capacity. Organizations face a tradeoff in designing these hubs, which might reduce complexity in the overall network but become a bottleneck themselves due to local congestion. This further illustrates the point that economies of scope “may decline not because of exogenous opportunity constraints but because of the rising costs of coordinating interdependencies”"
"Supply chains in many other industries suffer from an excess of some products and a shortage of others owing to an inability to predict demand. One department store chain that regularly had to resort to markdowns to clear unwanted merchandise found in exit interviews that one-quarter of its customers had left its stores empty-handed because the specific items they had wanted to buy were out of stock.
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Before devising a supply chain, consider the nature of the demand for your products.
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The first step in devising an effective supply-chain strategy is therefore to consider the nature of the demand for the products one’s company supplies.
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if one classifies products on the basis of their demand patterns, they fall into one of two categories: they are either primarily functional or primarily innovative. And each category requires a distinctly different kind of supply chain. The root cause of the problems plaguing many supply chains is a mismatch between the type of product and the type of supply chain.
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With their high profit margins and volatile demand, innovative products require a fundamentally different supply chain than stable, low-margin functional products do. To understand the difference, one should recognize that a supply chain performs two distinct types of functions: a physical function and a market mediation function. A supply chain’s physical function is readily apparent and includes converting raw materials into parts, components, and eventually finished goods, and transporting all of them from one point in the supply chain to the next. Less visible but equally important is market mediation, whose purpose is ensuring that the variety of products reaching the marketplace matches what consumers want to buy.
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The predictable demand of functional products makes market mediation easy because a nearly perfect match between supply and demand can be achieved. Companies that make such products are thus free to focus almost exclusively on minimizing physical costs—a crucial goal, given the price sensitivity of most functional products.
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That approach is exactly the wrong one for innovative products. The uncertain market reaction to innovation increases the risk of shortages or excess supplies. High profit margins and the importance of early sales in establishing market share for new products increase the cost of shortages. And short product life cycles increase the risk of obsolescence and the cost of excess supplies. Hence market mediation costs predominate for these products, and they, not physical costs, should be managers’ primary focus.
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Although the distinctions between functional and innovative products and between physical efficiency and responsiveness to the market seem obvious once stated, I have found that many companies founder on this issue. That is probably because products that are physically the same can be either functional or innovative."
