If you have been challenged to raise the OTIF (On Time In Full) performance of your business, one of the first things to do is eliminate the chaos. You know the chaos that I mean:
- Crises from missing delivery dates.
- Missing paperwork and trying to back track.
- Overloading the capacity of your business.
- Getting stuck because a handful of key staff are unavailable.
- Delivering the wrong items.
- Excessive overtime from trying (inefficiently) to fix mistakes.
- No one really knowing who is meant to be doing what.
All these symptoms, all these concerns, they suck the life out of a business. For the senior team, it drains energy and fogs visibility for what the business should be doing. For the rest of the staff, it can be demoralising.
If you want to achieve consistently high delivery levels, without ‘blood, sweat and tears’ you need to get these issues resolved.
Where do you start? I’d recommend you come up with a list of similar symptoms and ask yourself some deep questions, including this one:
“What have I done / not done to cause this problem?”
It is really easy to point the finger when problems are present in the business. It can be really hard to take a look in the mirror and accept the impact you create personally. Starting with yourself is a really powerful thing to do. If you are sufficiently high enough in your organisation, then this can bring with it dramatic results.
That said, every level can bring something to the table. For example, at the lowest levels of the organisation you can still flag up issues. You don’t have to be a victim of the symptoms, regardless of what level you are working at.
So, if you want to start removing the chaos from the business, so you can improve your OTIF performance, why not start with yourself and expand out from there? You might just find some people that share your vision and when a few of you pull together, great things can happen.