Clive Robinson •
@ Joe D,
With regards,
“Japan is running out of its favorite beer after ransomware attack”
You could have titled it,
“The land of Kan-Ban, Get’s a Wham-Bam”
Or similar (if it had been “Sapporo” then a “can ban”[1] would have worked 😉
But in all seriousness I’ve been making noises about the inadvisability of such supply chain over optimisations for years.
That is long before “Supply Chain Issues” became a term you would find in MSM Newspapers (remember them). Or 24Hour Broadcast NewsChans (that thankfully will die out in the next half decade as IP based pull-streaming takes over. And perhaps the most “tic-toc-ish of all” those “Talking Heads” that are more inane than neo-con mantra spouting MBA graduates (who should be neuter/neutralised as rapidly as possible).
I’ve actually been making dissenting comments around the same time “LEAN”[2] became a thing at the turn of the century for incompetent management to use as a term they thought made them sound clever… Which it did not as it’s just another “con method” similar to all those “programming methods” that get inflicted on people as a way to bully and humiliate them.
In essence the only thing certain types of management take from their 2day LEAN Seminar is the robotic
“Exterminate, Exterminate”
Attitude to what they think is “waste” that they get from the neo-con,
“Don’t leave money on the floor”.
Which is another inane and fairly worthless mantra, that any idiot can say applies to their latest “Hair Shirt Itch”.
All “value added processes” are by definition “subject to change” some within, but many beyond, the control of the process owner.
This means for a process to continue and ultimately to survive it has to have “Resilience” or it will cease.
To those who can not tell what the difference is between Resilience and actual Waste… They treat both the same and,
“Optimize both out of the process”.
So when a “change beyond control” happens to a process, as it always will at some point. The amount of harm caused by the change is inversely proportional to the amount of resilience in the process.
Remember the change can be to the method thus in theory “within control” or to the environment thus probably “not within control”
It’s why nature gave you insulin and fat around your belly. The insulin can be seen as for short term energy management “within control” such as if you miss a meal. The belly fat is for “not within control” such as famine caused by drought, flood, fire, plague, or worse.
Back over as long as recorded records go –which is over four millennia– we know that wise rulers planed for Famine in their countries. They knew that crops not just could, but would fail, and that hungry citizens would blame them in a fairly terminal way. They further knew they could not stop famine causing disasters. So they did what nature does which is mitigate them.
That is they took and stored certain crop excesses in what we would call warehouses waiting for the time a famine causing disaster happened. Thus they would have food that served two purposes,
1, It fed the citizens.
2, It acted as payment to the citizens as they “made good” from the disaster.
These two points appear completely lost on the neo-cons with their “leave nothing” mantras.
Based on a rather foolish notion that they can,
“All ways cut and run”
Well the Financial Crisis that killed a number of major financial entities that believed that nonsense should have been a major life lesson… But no…
We see it over and over in more recent times especially in increasingly authoritarian nations. Where “strong-men” and the “self entitled” just don’t act in anything but the short term.
The result,
“Change happens and they suffer harm and even die out.”
One such change might be that, Japanese beer drinkers nolonger getting their favourite brand, means another beer becomes their brand of choice thus the favourite…
So that over optimised and short sighted brand of beer goes into decline, potentially terminal decline, because of a lack of resilience, that management incorrectly saw as waste.
[1] For those who have not seen it Sapporo beer comes in a “Straight beer-glass” shaped can,
https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/268761483
What you can not see is that the top pulls out like modern tin cans and has a size that the bottom of a smaller stackable vegetable can drops in nice and snuggly. So you can turn the cans into desk-tidy pencil/pen holders or with a tiny bit of effort into small personal “cookie jars” or “sweetie pots”.
[2] What became “LEAN Manufacturing” started at Toyota Engineering back in the early 1950’s and was based on the notion that,
1, Respecting people is nice and makes them feel valued.
2, Waste is an expensive product of inefficiency.
Some may have heard of Peter Drucker an alleged Management guru –what ever that means– who is reported to have said,
“There’s nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”
And people have read a “whole load of it”, “into it”, ever since.
However Nature which has been around for a few billion years has learnt a few lessons about what the LEANsters call “WASTE” and it’s known by those who study such longevity as,
“resilience to unexpected change or disruption”
And is absolutely essential to,
“Survival of the species”
in any let alone hostile environment.
