Don’t Get Connected to Become Efficient, Become Efficient to Get Connected!
Credit to Author: Greg Johnson| Date: Tue, 08 Aug 2017 15:34:02 +0000
I love the game of squash. In recent years, it has been re-invigorated by technology including glass courts and digital distribution via the web. If you love sports and exceptional athletes and have 2 minutes, go to Youtube and check out almost any clip of the great contemporary Egyptian player, Ramy Ashour (try this one against Gregory Gaultier of France ).
Even better news for squash players! Forbes magazine rated squash as THE healthiest sport in the world, and the British Journal of Sports Medicine found that risk of death from any cause was 47% lower among those who played racket sports.
This may lead some to rush out to a court, and if you do, that is great, but please bear in mind another point of view, “Get fit to play squash, don’t play squash to get fit”. Advice for the pros is for every hour they spend on court, they should devote 45 minutes to performance training. Even more so for frequent business travellers, you need to devote some time outside of court time to basic squash fitness. Enjoy the game, but take care to do some fitness and flexibility training so you can execute your game plan without injury.
As in the game of squash, we can see parallels in the mining industry where CEO’s are pursuing top players like Rio Tinto in the digital transformation game. There is also some great advice out there on how to proceed in terms of maturity models, strategy and the steps along the path.
One of the key things we also see in mining is clients getting “on the court” to play the game without working on the “basics” of fitness and flexibility. If we call these two dimensions efficiency (fitness) and connectivity (playing the game), we can draw four boxes…
We want to move from Box 1 to Box 4, but doing it “all in one go” is very difficult. Step by step, the path from Box 1 to Box 3 to Box 4 seems possible, but it can lead to frustration and confusion as we ask the mining supply chain for objectives it can’t deliver on (like the squash player who knows the game, but is not fit enough to execute). This leave the path from Box 1 to Box 2 to Box 4 as the way to go.
Of course, this is an iterative process; the point is to keep the connectivity (match play) in synch with the efficiency (fitness). Too much focus on one or the other is just wasted effort.
To work on your “fitness”, have a look at these solutions for improving efficiency: Alarm Advisor, Operator Training or Advanced Process Control.
To work on your “game” for improving connectivity across the supply chain, go here: Unified Planning and Scheduling.
See you on the court!
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