Management Mindset

Management mindset must be willing to recognize the need for defining flexibility and have an ability to define what kind of supply chain flexibility is needed for the business. 

Long term must be skilled enough to match supply chain design, including design capacity, with customer requirements. 

Short term must understand markets well enough to define requirements for response time and production flexibility. 

The responses are interdependent. That is, a company must have 1 in order to get 2 and it must have 2 to get 3. The next sections explain each further and their implication for SCM. 

If one accepts that change in variables such as product demand and product mix will occur in the marketplace, then one must accept that 

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The presence of any of these should raise alarms. However, the absence of any of the symptoms is not sufficient for achieving a management mindset. Management must articulate the types of flexibility needed for the business. 

NOTE As a consequence of the different kinds of operational and management problems associated with raising steam in industrial boiler plants, it often requires a different mindset than that needed for a base-load utility power house, where personnel strive to maintain steady-state (but knife-edge) operating conditions. The differences between industrial plants and power generators is also reflected in the waterside chemistries and monitoring and control objectives of their respective boiler plant systems. 

Strategic entrepreneurship integrating entrepreneurial and strategic management perspectives. In M. A. Hitt, R. D. Ireland, S. M. Camp, D. L. Sexton (eds.). Strategic Entrepreneurship Creating a New Mindset. Oxford Blackwell. 

Companies aiming to reap the benefits here need programs that not only address the optimization of the operating system, but also performance management as well as mindsets and behaviors across the organization. Only if organiza-... 

Reinforcing with formal mechanisms. Management needs to ensure that roles and relationships, basic management and business processes, reward and recognition systems, and information systems all support and reinforce the requisite mindsets and behaviors. It is close to impossible to convince employees that more risk taking will be a desired behavior in the future, if just one person who then takes a risk and fails is demoted. 

An interesting component in preventing recalls is the philosophy and mindset of the QA managers within afirm. Are they proactive or are they reactive ... 

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