Flipping your thinking

From toddler to teenager, most of us had a fairly similar educational experience: The teacher would stand at the front of the room and spew out information that the students were to absorb. Then they would assign homework that would, theoretically at least, test how well you absorbed the content. The homework assignments would then be scored by the teacher and – if you were lucky – you might find some scrawled notes in the margin to give you a clue as to where you may have gone astray.

All this assumes, of course, that you didn’t just copy your homework from a smart (if gullible) friend, thereby completely circumventing the ability of the homework assignment to test knowledge. Not to say that this approach was completely ineffective. Somehow, most of us did learn what we needed to know to become productive members of society. That said, when the best praise you can muster is that it’s “not completely ineffective”, then you are basically admitting that there is ample room for improvement. 

Karl Fish is a veteran teacher with 20 years of experience. He teaches high school math in a town just south of Denver, Colorado.  Karl thought he could do better for his students than “not completely ineffective”, so he decided to flip the traditional thinking on its head.

Instead of using class-time to “teach” in the traditional sense, Karl tapes his lessons and uploads them to YouTube. Classroom time is used for application and practice.  His students are required to watch the lecture whenever and wherever it is most convenient for them.  What would be traditionally considered “homework” is actually done during in-class time.

The result of this flip in thinking has been significantly improved understanding of the content. Working through examples and case studies not only improves the students understanding, but also improves their ability to collaborate with fellow students and Karl himself.

Contrast this approach with doing your homework in the evenings (maybe even the wee hours of the morning). If you get stuck, there are few alternatives other than to become increasingly frustrated and demoralized.

In Karl’s class, you can pose your question to a group (many of whom are likely struggling with the same question) and work together to solve the problem. What better skill and habits are there for someone to learn in high school?

Retail supply chain planning is also in need of a flip in thinking.

Traditional thinking in retail has ingrained into people’s heads that ordering is the key decision a supply chain planner needs to make. Day in and day out the retail supply chain planner only has 2 questions:

1) Should I order today?

2) How much should I order?

All anyone can talk about nowadays is “demand driven supply chains” that are super-responsive to consumer demand – yet the entire planning approach is geared toward figuring out when to place an order upstream with, at best, an indirect link to the actual customer demand.

Flowcasting flips that thinking completely. In a nutshell, the decision to place an order is a mere after-effect of the planning process (not the one and only decision) and, generally, it should be performed by a computer, not a human being.

Instead of asking “When and how much should I order”, maybe the first question should be “When does more stock need to arrive?” – Isn’t that what’s really important to your ability to stay in stock and serve a customer?

By focusing on this question first, new thinking emerges. Once you understand when product needs to arrive, then you can calculate when you need product to ship (based on where it’s coming from) and when you need to order.

Of course, to answer this question you’ll need a system to project inventory and product arrival dates well into the future.  And to calculate the corresponding ship dates and order dates. The basic change in philosophy is simple – to really know when product needs to be ordered, you must first know when it needs to arrive at the destination.

While this may sound quite simple and logical, in practice it requires a great deal of education and understanding to make such a flip – particularly if people have been “ordering” for a long time.

In our experience, most retailers continue to subscribe to the “order first, ask questions later” philosophy and flipping to an arrival based planning approach like Flowcasting will not be a slam dunk, regardless of how logical it sounds.

If you’re struggling with the concept, we’d be happy to schedule some homework time with you and your team.

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