Win the Race with Better Coordination of Capacity & Constraints

In today’s fast-changing environment, business teams need to be able to anticipate resource constraints and plan contingencies quickly to avoid costly delays and frustrations. Failure to perform to new competitive requirements could mean the difference between winning and losing new business.  Teams are being asked to…

• Cut time-to-market by 50%…
• and cut cost 50%.

Hoarding Costs Time and Money, Give it Up!

Teams rightly feel the need to take control of their own destiny. They hoard equipment and schedules because they can’t trust the asset, resource, cell, or chamber will be available when they need it.  They take action to “hoard” the schedule.  This triggers a vicious cycle of cascading schedule updates, new requests, urgent equipment and resource constraints, and their inevitable costs and delays. Solve this problem with a trustworthy process and hoarding ends.  When teams adopt Sente’s tools and practices they no longer feel the need to hoard and instead start Working Together, Better.  They double their speed & efficiency.  Work becomes more enjoyable, innovation increases, and everyone wins.  

Establish a Trustworthy Network of Test Capabilities

Hoarding is common in the complex, asset-intensive enterprise processes that rely on scheduling and sharing costly test equipment. Accelerated Enterprise Asset Management (aEAM) helps to Accelerate Enterprise Processes by establishing trustworthy networks. To end hoarding requires more than simple asset management or scheduling tools. It requires your teams to know the truth about their evolving resource situation and trust that the processes and people around them will help. Trust and truth are critical to building a Foundation for Speed with your network. One of the Scireo tools available to help you anticipate constraints and capacity quickly, allowing your business to get to market first with less cost is CoordinateTRM. It provided the critical capabilities outlined below.

Critical Capabilities For Establishing Your Trustworthy Network

A Highly-Visible, Shared Schedule

Traditionally, most organizations have evolved their own sets of tools that are useful for the work they need to produce in their department. They include spreadsheets, whiteboards, project management software, etc. They don’t communicate/integrate with each other and make it difficult for the different functions to collaborate together. They enable each of the functions to get their work done without “distraction”. They reinforce and insulate the silos from the truth. They reinforce hoarding.

Imagine a tool that any user from any group whether it is lab technicians and engineers, project engineers, managers, directors, support groups, and any organizations concerned with test can get test status at the click of a button all with the same shared version of the truth. CoordinateTRM is that tool. It collapses silos and begins to end hoarding.

Users can log in from anywhere they have an internet connection regardless of the group they are supporting or their role, eliminating time wasted coordinating test statuses.  Users can get real-time statuses of the testing they have scheduled including the specific details and outcomes of the test using CoordinateTRM’s E-Lab Log and equipment used using our Equipment List functionality.  CoordinateTRM also gives users the ability to see if there are any issues with testing or the test facility the testing is taking place in.  Additionally, CoordinateTRM allows users to coordinate scheduled maintenance around testing to minimize downtime and unplanned break/fix maintenance of the test facility.  Less downtime leads to more revenue.

Scheduling Effects on Equipment Capacity and Milestones

Everyone in test knows tests pushing to the right can and do produce test equipment capacity breakdowns as well as issues with project milestones.  CoordinateTRM is a smart tool that can help with equipment capacity issues and milestones as well.

Using our Integrated Equipment Request functionality users can make a reservation in the system for equipment and associate it with the specific event on the schedule. As schedules change this capability enables quick identification of equipment constraints that often go unnoticed until it is too late to avoid a delay.

In CoordinateTRM milestones are also made visible through our Smart Milestone capability. Issues affecting the successful completion of a milestone are made visible with bright warns and notifications on various management consoles.

Process Instrumentation, Identification of Breakdowns

One complaint many managers have is they aren’t exactly sure where their major process breakdowns occur so they don’t know where they should be focusing their investments. Often different groups have different ideas about the highest leverage action possible to resolve speed and cost issues. With CoordinateTRM, process breakdowns are captured and reported in Pareto format enabling teams to identify systemic failures whose solution is high leverage.

Often breakdowns are identified that are the result of the habitual ways people are used to working in silos with their spreadsheets, ad hoc phone calls, and hallway conversations. One we find often is last-minute requests for support groups that result in delays when the support group doesn’t have the capacity as they are responding to multiple “ASAP” requests.

One Version of The Truth Leads to Speed, Less Frustration, More Fun

We write about how trust leads to truth and ultimately to speed in Are Your Teams Equipped for Speed? In this blog post, we provide some additional explanation about the algorithm CoordinateTRM exploits to deliver results. More importantly, it enabled teams to avoid “The Grind” and the anxiety caused by expectations we don’t have the capabilities to fulfill. Take your foot off the brakes and put it on the gas with Accelerated Enterprise Asset Management (aEAM) from Sente.

Sign up for a demo or a first conversation to see how we can be of service to you and your organization.