Dr. Watson Says: |
 |
| ...you can often avoid capital investment with a good network study. |
|
What Do You Say?
|
|
|
|
When people talk about the savings they get from network design, they mostly focus on the transportation, warehousing, or manufacturing savings.
This is a reasonable thing to talk about since network design studies are good at finding these savings.
But, there is another category of savings that doesn’t get as much attention as it should: capital avoidance. This doesn’t get as much attention, because the result is that you do nothing. But, it shouldn’t be like this. If the alternative to “doing nothing” is investing $15M in new capacity, then you should consider “doing nothing” a big success.
So, how do you find savings by avoiding capital investments? When a firm thinks it is running out of capacity, it will allocate money to invest in more. But, you can avoid this capital investment with a good network study.
A network design study with a special focus on capacity can help avoid this investment in capital by forcing the organization to understand capacity and by looking at the supply chain.
Capacity is tough to measure. A warehouse manager may claim that they are running at 125% of capacity. This seems impossible until you consider that they may be measuring against an outdated theoretical number or may be storing product in creative ways. Likewise for a manufacturing plant, the capacity may change with small staffing changes, changes to overtime policy, or the mix of products running down the line.
Previous Columns by
Dr. Watson |
|
|
I have found that companies are often surprised by how much capacity they have when they go through the rigorous process of loading capacity into a network design tool. This process alone may help avoid the capital investment.
In addition, a network model that considers the entire supply chain can often find additional capacity by shifting products to different plants or reassigning customers.
In the end, if the expenses go up a little, but you are able to avoid a big capital investment, you have done well.
Final Thoughts
One company I worked with took this idea to the extreme. Instead of investing in a new plant to support some of their remote markets, they decided to get out of those markets and focus on their markets closer to their existing plants. So, this type of analysis can be quite strategic.
|
