It’s hard to believe and counter-intuitive but it’s often easier to make something 10 times better than it is to make it 10 percent better.
Yes, really.
That’s because when you’re working to make things a bit better – like 10 percent better – you always start with the existing tools, assumptions and paradigms, and focus on tweaking an existing approach/solution that’s become the accepted norm.
This kind of progress is driven by extra effort, extra money, and extra resources – attempting to squeeze just a wee bit more from the current system. While making a minor improvement is generally a good thing, often we find ourselves stuck in the same old paradigms.
But when you aim for a 10 times improvement, you need to lean in and focus on being brave and creative – the kind of thinking that, literally and metaphorically, can put a man on Mars.
Retail Flowcasting solutions have been emerging for a while with some technology companies claiming that Flowcasting is in the DNA of their solution. More often than not that’s debatable but what’s not is that a retail Flowcasting solution needs to be at least 10 times more scalable and simpler than similar solutions that have been used in distribution and manufacturing – because in retail we’re dealing with 10’s of millions of item/location combinations.
We’ve been lucky enough to implement a purpose-built, times-ten retail Flowcasting solution. In our experience, it’s 10 times faster, 10 times simpler, and costs about 10 times less to implement compared to others who claim to have Flowcasting native solutions.
Over the course of the implementation, the chief architect shared with us how he was able to build something that’s a times-ten solution.
His secret:
- Start from scratch
- Solve the hard problems first
Most existing solutions are too heavy and burdensome – the result of solution providers not knowing how to say “no” to a specific ask – usually from a paying client that doesn’t know better, but also sometimes from competitive peer pressure. Checklist Charlie said our solution needs 11 different ways to handle safety stock, so we’ll make it so. The result is a system that cannot be the foundational starting point to build a times-ten solution.
Our architectural hero said the reason he started from scratch is that only what was necessary would go into the solution and not a drop more. A bit like Einstein once said, “everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler”.
In tandem with making things as simple as possible, our colleague believes that another reason he was successful is that he also solved the hard problems first.
To wit, he worked, tested and developed stunningly intuitive and simple ways to handle a variety of problems that have plagued existing providers from morphing their current solutions to a retail-focused Flowcasting solution, notably:
- Extreme scalability
- Handling slow selling items properly (both the forecast and the replenishment plans)
- Planning for product phase out (to provide a valid simulation of reality for any item at any location)
- Managing seasonal items (to maximize sales and minimize inventory carryover)
I won’t bore you with the specifics on how our architectural and design colleague solved each of these chronic retail planning challenges. He did say that he’d spoken to a number of grassroots folks in retail about each of these challenges and then – from a blank sheet of paper and some fundamental principles – developed, tested, refined and eventually delivered a times-ten solution.
Once the hard problems were solved, he believed that the rest of the planning challenges would be chicken-shit to deal with. Turns out, he was right.
The lesson here is simple, yet profound. If you’re looking for a quantum leap improvement – a times-ten solution if you will – then you need to start from scratch and solve the hard stuff first.