Good Habits Can Be Applied to Your Supply Chain, Too!

Tom Corley is an internationally recognized authority on habits and wealth creation. Tom conducted a five-year study of the rich and poor and identified over 300 daily habits that separate the “haves” from the “have not’s.

Tom’s studies found that 40% or more of all of our daily activities are habits. Habits are unconscious behaviors, thinking, decisions and emotions that we engage in every day. Many habits are good, like showering every day, brushing your teeth, brushing your hair, etc. But many are also bad like drinking too much alcohol, overeating, watching too much T.V. Bad habits hold us back from living a successful life and good habits help move us forward to a successful life.

After reading one of Tom’s recent blogs it moved me to think about the habits between a successful supply chain and ones that struggle. During client assessments we often find bad habits leaving the supply chain organization in a sub-optimized state of operation. We find organizations:

• Do not trust their data or have visibility to the right data to make confident decisions
• Have too much inventory (tying up working capital) or too little inventory potentially impacting service levels
• Employees work harder vs smarter and are constantly in firefighting mode
• Leadership and employees are frustrated because they don’t know how to align their business processes and systems to drive efficiency improvements

Tom has discovered one of the keys to success is forging and maintaining daily habits. Are these habits taking you closer to success or moving you further from it? Here are a few of the daily life habits Tom points out in his writings and how to apply them to the daily habits of your supply chain.

Habits Which Increase Your Chances of Success in Life and Your Supply Chain

Exercise

Life: Successful people are healthy people and make exercise an integral part of their lives. Daily cardio of 20 minutes or more reduces risk factors for all sorts of age-related diseases.Supply Chain: Successful supply chains promote communication as a daily exercise to discuss the exceptions and unexpected issues of the day. This effort helps address the issues and opportunities of the day and promotes cross-functional collaboration to address the root causes of problems.

Eating Healthy Foods

Life: Successful people eat healthy foods and do so in moderation. They limit the amount of junk food, alcohol and empty calories they consume to improve the performance of their digestion, energy levels, and thinking.Supply Chain: Successful supply chains keep their data clean and up-to-date. Clean data promotes the accuracy and confidence to make better decisions. Eliminating outdated documents (POs, Production Orders, Sales Orders, etc.) from your systems ensures the integrity of the data is good and the system outputs trustworthy.

Healthy Relationships

Life: Successful people invest in relationships with others who share one thing in common – Positivity.Supply Chain: Successful supply chains establish cross-functional relationships to promote communication and address issues and opportunities. The supply chain is an end-to-end integrated organization and the relationships within it should be integrated. To better leverage data and optimize decision making, move from functional silos to healthy, cross-functional teams that are focused on shared goals.

Staying Focused

Life: Successful people set daily, monthly, annual and long-term goals. They focus on the goals every day and keep track of where they are in achieving them.

‍Supply Chain: Successful supply chains focus on setting goals, establishing good daily habits (addressing exceptions, lean meetings, etc.) and measuring daily against the desired goals. Whether it’s reducing exception messages and over-due supply and demand elements, improving service levels and OTIF or optimizing inventory levels the key to success is staying focused on good daily habits, accountability, and measurement against the goals.

Constant ImprovementLife: The vast majority of the rich surveyed by Corley, 88%, read for at least 30 minutes each day. They read for knowledge and to get an edge on the competition and closely tracking the latest developments in their fields.

‍Supply Chain: Successful supply chain organizations invest in the education of their people to develop critical thinking. Increasing the proficiency of employees to be able to plan and analyze, interpret and act, optimize and adjust increases employee productivity leading to an environment of efficiencies and constant improvement. Tools and systems are only as effective as the heads and hands that operate them.

The process you choose is defined by your habits. Good habits create wealth, health and happiness.If you want to succeed in life and in your supply chain, you must forge good habits. Our experts at Reveal focus on SAP best-practices to help you create, maintain, and sustain good habits within your supply chain. See how our team can assist yours to Transform What Matters in your organization.