SPEAKER 0

Back. Welcome back to week 5 for Ops 157. I hope by now you're beginning to get
into the flow of the session. You know, you might have a few little assessments do
for us. We've just really had the one quiz. Um, and I hope, you know, you are all
slowly starting to get into the routine of how this subject operates, in addition
to how other subjects operate. And basically we've, you know, almost reached the
point of halfway, so we're at a stage now where, you know, we can begin to start
having a little bit more fun. We've obviously been having just mountains of fun so
far, um, and now we're at a stage where kind of we get to just start, you know,
less thinking, more doing. So this is very timely then, that we've reached the
stage where we're trying to actually begin to undertake a study of supply chain
execution. Now, Execution is simply within this context, just kind of the act of
doing things, you know, to execute something, to execute a plan. I don't mean
executing, you know, the, you know, French Revolution, King Louis the 14th, don't
quote me on that, um, you know, form of execution, you know, I don't mean to take,
A human life, a bit of a strange subject to be doing, um, what we're talking about
though is simply, having a strategy that informs the design and now you're actually
putting that design into action. So this is the 3rd phase then of the sort of
fundamental processes that we talk about within supply chain, being strategy,
design, execution, and people. So this is where, you know, we do things. We spend a
lot of time talking, now we're gonna be spending time doing, but technically we're
gonna spend time talking about the doing. But I think you would understand what I'm
referring to. What this phase actually helps us understand is not only, you know,
how, what happens when we put these plans and designs and strategies and whatever
you wanna call them into action, but it's actually super important to help
understand. You know, what your supply chain is doing, what are customers and
suppliers thinking, how are they appraising or valuing the supply chain. And their
attitude as well. So let's say you walk into a shopping center, so take the image
right there. I've got you as a customer, you are not there thinking about, oh,
this, you know, Woolworths, for example, for those unfamiliar, big supermarket
chain in Australia, you you're not walking into a supermarket thinking, wow, I can
really see Woolworths' strategy in action. I can really see how they've done a test
on analysis to better understand my individual consumer preferences, and I can see
how well that influences their supply chain design, but they seem to have, you
know, centralized warehousing that they use that to ship goods to stores. I can
really see all of this. No, of course not. Be weird if you did, not even I do that,
and I'm, you know, king, number one weirdo of 0 157. You can't come for the crown.
That is not what you do, you walk into a shop, you want there to be the product or
service that you are going to exchange for money or for other goods or services.
You walk into the supermarket, you want to see that it's got food, it's got
products, it's got whatever it is that you're there to get. You don't care about
anything else. So that's why this is the most important part of the supply chain,
because it's the actual doing. Customers don't care for the earlier phases, they
don't care for, you know, the amount of effort you've put into coming out with a
beautiful cohesive strategy. They care about whether or not it's doing what they
want to do. It is about whether your supply chain is actually, Providing the
customer service offer, the product or service offering rather, that you've talked
about. So, essentially, we have the textbook kind of shapes this, and I'll talk
about the textbook in a second, is across seven key categories. So this is new
project, um, or service delivery, so how you're actually coming up with and
implementing, What customers want, determining what they want, but then ensuring
actually you can firstly develop the correct customer service propositions. If
you're unsure what that means, just hold your horses, actually fulfilling the
orders. So things that almost sound, you know, basic. We see a lot of these phrases
in everyday life, you know, customer service, order fulfillment. What they are, by
and large, and it goes back to something I said I believe at the start of session
around supply chains, they are something that is so incredibly simple. Customer
service is about ensuring that the customer receives or perceives value in the
service offering that you've given them. It's like, it's so obvious, it's almost
painful. If you could see my face doing this, I'm actually like squeezing my face
as I say this because it's so incredibly obvious, but it's not done well. If it was
done well, we wouldn't need to be, and you know, we wouldn't need to be even
studying this, we wouldn't need to be having conversations if everything was done
so perfectly well. Same with order fulfillment, the simple steps of providing a
customer with the order that they want. So basic, right, but it doesn't happen like
that. Also within this execution process is how we manage returns. Returns, as I
alluded to, I believe a few weeks ago, is, you know, most commonly we can think of
that as physical good returns, but also things like feedback. So how do you deal
when the customer service or or the fulfillment aspects don't go to plan? How do we
address customer complaints, how do we address customer returns if they're actually
returning a particular product, all of these kind of help go into that earlier part
of customer appraisals of the actual execution of the supply chain. Then, the next
three, which is what we cover in the last video, is around the more like supply
chain management, so more like supply chain level, I suppose. So we talk about
suppliers, um, in particular around, you know, Selecting suppliers, so last week
when we talked about design, we talked a little bit about like geography, um, we
talked a little bit about, you know, systems design, we talked about a few things
at that more, I suppose, next level of, um, abstraction or next level, um, of
strategic thinking or whatever phrase I'm trying to look for for the moment. But
what we're trying to do this week is going, OK, well how do you actually select
suppliers? You know, what, what does it mean to select a supplier. Obviously, all
of these are gonna be super, super contextual, which is fine. Um we'll run through
a few examples to clarify that. Um, but essentially it's about what do we have in
place to determine appropriate suppliers for a product or service, and the degree
of collaboration, cooperation or integration that we have with what, sorry, with
both the suppliers, but also the customers. Then within that video I'll also talk a
little bit about um support systems for execution. We kind of talked about this in
more detail last week in design, where we talked about, you know, the tech
technological requirements and you know, particular types of, Network
infrastructure or particular types of software, etc. this is essentially going, OK,
I've got them, now, let's put them in place. One thing I do want to clarify um is
that what we're doing within these next few videos is blending these ideas
together. The reason I'm doing this is that I want you to really not think of
things that we talk about in this subject as isolated elements. You know, customer
service and enabling suppliers might, within this slide and within the textbook,
present themselves as two separate ideas, but actually they're so intrinsically
linked. That you can't have one without the other. In the same way that I've talked
about strategy, design, and our execution not being a sort of linear step, these
things are occurring all at once. I know that can be a little bit difficult,
particularly when you're going, hang on, strategy is about coming up with what the
product service, What product or service offering is and their execution is doing
it, you know, that's got to happen one between the other, that is true, as much as
it is untrue as well. The point I'm trying to make, and I'm not trying to make this
like a sort of scratch your head analogy, the point that I'm trying to make is
simply that all of these are designed to be done concurrently where possible. Or
more importantly, I don't want you to just pigeonhole these as being one step
before the other. One key term that we're gonna be talking about a lot within this
week, um, and something that massively deviates from the textbook, um, as I talk
about in the, um, Google page, I don't go into detail too much within, um, some
parts of this textbook just because it's not necessary. We talk a lot about
processes. So following on from what I did last week, I do just want to define it
so you're not necessarily confused or that we're on the same page for it. A process
is simply the steps for producing or providing a product or service. So I've got
this perhaps delicious example of cake on the screen, which looking at it now, is
actually an incredibly high quality photo. Um, yeah. Anyway, um, so you're making a
cake. You as an individual, you go into your kitchen, you are baking a cake. There
are a number of steps you're going to do to actually mix the ingredients together.
Before that, you're gonna have to purchase the ingredients. By the time that you
get everything, you put it in the oven, etc. the cake's done, or if you're not
doing it in the oven. Now, there's a myriad of steps. I'm not a good bakery. You
you can probably tell, um, then you eventually get the cake, you cut it, you put it
on plates to serve, etc. That's the process. That is the process of making cake. So
as I said, it's just the steps for producing a product or service. Where we're
gonna take this
view of processes is within the context of supply chains, we can view them as
service processes and product processes which we can classify or group together
according to two key ideas. These are, firstly, the degree of standardization. What
we mean by that is, think of the word standard, you know, you hear the word
standard, what do you think? You know, it's like average, almost, right? You know,
similar. So, the, if something is standardized, it's the same. You know, standard
operating procedures are the same operating procedures. Standard is like a base
level of something that's acceptable. So if a product is standardized, it means
it's almost the same. The degree of standardization, therefore means the way in
which something, a product or service is the same for each. Distinctive customer
order, so cakes are the cakes the same for a customer, or are they different per
customer order? We call that the level of variety, so the more, Like the higher the
variety, the lower the standardization. Going with the cake example, if I go into a
baker and buy one of the cakes there, that's a standardized cake. That cake, they
might have a few different types, but that cake is there that they've made, and
they'll make care of many of them. That me as the customer, it doesn't matter that
it's me, Johnny, I'm just a customer buying that cake, versus a cake shop, if I go
in, good example, wedding cakes. I go in and get a customized wedding cake. That's
made specifically for every single component that I want, then that process of them
making cakes has a high degree of variety, or low degree of standardization. Run
through some few examples when we get there later on. You can have variety and how
much variety there is or how standardized things are, but then we can also look at
the processes and how much they produce a particular product or service over time,
which we can call the volume. Time here is kind of subjective um as when we go
through a few examples, um, we can understand what that means. I mean, more so just
the way that we view it over time. So, you know, if the case of making cake, how
long does it take to make a cake? If I had all of the ingredients to make an
infinite amount of cake in front of me, how long would it take for me to make each
cake? Might be on average 35 minutes. Let's say 30 minutes, just cause that'll help
this analogy a bit more. You take a cake that takes 30 minutes, how many can you
produce in an hour? You know, 2. If you have 8 hours of making cakes, how many can
you produce? Presuming no breaks, 16 cakes. So that's volume. We'll talk about the
processes in a little bit more detail as we go through the next two videos in
particular, but as, but as always, before we do that, um, I do want to introduce a
leading question, however, just to give you a bit of an overview of what these
processes would look like. This chart is fantastic, however, you don't need to
memorize any of this. All the green squares, so you can see where we have project
processes, jobbing, batch, etc. and these 3, we talk about them in the next two
videos. But this will be a great slide for you to refer back to after I've talked
through these concepts, so you can see how they relate, particularly we're focused
on variety and volume. This is just a great slide, um sorry, a great graph that I
got from, Um, the textbook in another subject I've taught, the second year subject,
um, on operations, it's a really, really useful slide, and we'll be coming back to
that in a bit. However, and that photo is blurry, um, because of, you know,
politics and elections being an occurring thing around the world, I wanna talk
about, as a leading question for this week, how on earth do we manage an election?
Is an election a supply chain? Yes, that is, yes, but we are approaching this from
the view of the Australian Electoral Commission. So for those completely
unfamiliar, um, which would most likely be, um, any of the, our international
students, any domestic students, if you're unfamiliar, um that's, that's. Slightly
concerning, um, Australian federal elections and also local councilors can go into
that are managed by the Australian Electoral Commission. Actually, are local
councilors managed? No, anyway, disregard my slight tangent. Australian Electoral
Commission manages and runs these elections in terms of providing the sources and
resources for people to vote, to count, etc. etc. That is what we are going to
explore as our leading question for this week that we'll come back to throughout
the next few videos.