• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2801 0

up on real, good projects. Note that not only is our ability to win opportunities jeopardized by bad multitasking, but also there are many good opportunities in the market that require more attention by the salespeople in order to expose and win them. An example could be a very good project that a client for some reason is contemplating carrying out with another supplier, and therefore we would not hear about it unless we devote time and attention to expose it. Another common example is a project that is being managed by other personnel within the client’s organization to whom we are not currently talking. It is highly important, therefore, to notice that bad multitasking on the current opportunities in the funnel also has devastating effects on the ability to introduce more good projects. In essence, if we desire to win more high-value projects (have better projects and increase the flow), we should limit the number of opportunities (Fig. 21-2b), selecting very carefully to what to devote our attention.

FIGURE 21-2a Fill the funnel.

Now, the conflict is clear, as we see in Fig. 21-2c.

According to the second concept of supply chain, the primary objective of flow should be translated into a practical mechanism that guides Operations when not to produce (prevents overproduction). In our scenario, this means limiting the number of opportunities in the funnel. We now understand that what prevented us from doing so is the above conflict—the fear that limiting the number of opportunities would result in not having enough opportunities in the funnel to generate the desired sales volume.

But is this fear really valid? We assumed that in order to have enough opportunities, we should flood the funnel with opportunities. It is a chicken-and-egg situation. Flooding the funnel results in the low hit rate that leads us to introduce more and more opportunities. This loop continuously makes us believe that to have enough opportunities to generate the high sales volume we need to have many, many opportunities in the funnel. However, as we see in reality, this never brought us to the targets we have set. Actually, by introducing more and more opportunities, we were not getting enough orders to reach the high sales targets.

FIGURE 21-2b Limit the number of opportunities.

FIGURE 21-2c The dilemma of filling the funnel versus limiting opportunities.

FIGURE 21-3 Limit the number of opportunities.

Think what would be the case if the funnel would be occupied with good opportunities and better attention would be provided to each. Would we still need to have as many opportunities in the funnel to reach high sales volumes? Limiting the number of opportunities in the funnel would result in providing much better attention to each opportunity and induce us to look for and introduce good projects. If this is the case, then in order to have enough opportunities to reach the sales volume, we don’t need to introduce every request for a project we receive. In fact, we should actually limit the opportunities in the funnel, as in Fig. 21-3.

As we just concluded, it makes sense to limit the number of opportunities in the funnel. The question then becomes how to do it. At the early stages of the process (where most bad opportunities lie), we do not have a due date that would determine the release point of the opportunity to the funnel in the same manner in which our production system operates.6 We needed a different mechanism to limit the number of opportunities in the funnel. Here we turned to the Project Management solution of TOC.

As you know, bad multitasking is prevalent in multi-project environments, such as R&D or maintenance departments in any company, where shared resources are working on many projects in parallel. The solution to reduce dramatically the bad multitasking in such environments is simply to set a maximum number of open projects (even if it means freezing existing projects). Only when a project is completed is a new project opened. We decided to follow the same approach. We would determine a maximum number of open