Learn more - Availability management
The fruits of the hard work can be lost if there is nothing to sell.
Or good margins can evaporate into expediting and excess costs.
Balancing the fine line between 'too little' and 'too much' requires purposefully built availability management. The true acid test for availability management comes when something surprising happens in the market.
Availability as a machine
Managing availability requires balancing several fast-moving elements, e.g. demand, re-fill schedules, buffers and costs. Dealing with this complexity for thousands of materials, BOMs, differentiation points, products and customers cannot be done case-by-case, but rather it requires purpose-built availability practices to reduce needs to invent wheel again, and analytics tools to help see through the complexity and find the priorities needing more work.
Availability as a game
Availability management can never be fully 'hardcoded' into an IT tool in a way that could allow taking the hands off and simply observing as the steering logics and parameters run the show. The range of possible risks and actions is so diverse that no program or logic can be pre-built to handle all possibilities. Also, on the other side of the table there are people actively looking for gaps in the armor that could allow them to boost their margins at your expense. Finally, building strong basis and toolbox for managing surprises requires close in-person collaboration with suppliers and customers already during times of calm.
Ultimately, availability management is a game, but the player with better machine in the back-end will have an advantage.
Preventing fires
Securing availability starts well before any risks even appear on the radar. The business model needs to define how problems need to be dealt with when they come, and trying to make it beneficial for all parties to do their outmost to get it sorted. Supplier base should be built to provide plan-B:s and rewards for high-availability suppliers. Operative practices should prevent others' opportunistic behavior and build the needed mutual trust to improvise beyond pre-agreed practices when surprises happen.
Fighting fires
Despite all best efforts and preparations, something will eventually go wrong, and crash actions are needed to minimize damages. These crash actions are urgent and require complex coordination across people and companies. The urgency requires that the issues cannot wait for normal process cadences to make decisions, and complexity requires that different people cannot just rush to do uncoordinated things. Effective firefighting requires preparing in advance a fast-pace working modes that can be set up when the need arises.