It happens to every growing business: A task that used to be a breeze suddenly becomes a real challenge.
It’s easy enough for a truck driver with one truck to plan his route. When he hires his first employee, they divide deliveries between themselves almost without thinking. Once the business has 10 trucks or so, someone is usually hired to assign work and coordinate activities. But as the fleet grows, the business inevitably finds itself struggling with empty miles, partially filled trucks, and missed deliveries. Somewhere between 10 and 100 trucks, things got out of hand.
Similarly, a manufacturing company with long production runs of the same product can plan on a napkin. When more complexity is added – for example by incorporating different packaging, product sizes and batch sizes – creating a production schedule becomes a major headache.
Which brings me to jigsaw puzzles and the title of this post.
A jigsaw puzzle with six pieces is hardly a puzzle. One with 25 pieces can be completed in a minute or two. But what of those mammoth 1000-piece puzzles?
As the number of pieces increases, the possible combinations increase exponentially to create a formidable brain teaser. So here’s the essence of a puzzle: You have many options but only a few ways (perhaps just one) of achieving the desired result. Recognizing that your organization has puzzles, and that you need professionals to solve them, is an important first step.
Many organizations have already taken this step. They have appointed planners and created supply chain planning departments. In most cases, these planners are expected to use their ingenuity to arrive at one solution out the huge number of possible options. This solution may be ‘feasible’ but it is often far from optimal.
Significant improvements can be achieved by supporting planners with tools that fully understand the puzzle, visualize problems and solutions, and automate the solution process with powerful optimization technology.
It all starts, however, with recognizing that you have a supply chain puzzle to solve.
