TABLE OF CONTENTS The practice of solving problems by importing best practices is not abest practice.
Michael Schrage [42]
While this volume is not constructed in any sort of formal logical hierarchy, a lot of thepoints we emphasize can be traced back to some key core principles. These principles come from manysources: the business and operations literature, experience by the author, and, in a few cases,simple logic. In this chapter we will make them explicit, so that it is easy to refer to them as wemake the case in later chapters for consciously and carefully building planning structures in theenterprise.
[42]Schrage, Michael, Worst practice, CIO Magazine, February15, 2003.
Planning is only worthwhile if we use it to actuallymake decisions about resources, to commit or uncommit them to a given task, to increase or decreasethem, to accept orders, or try to delay them. Indeed, this is the first principle we introduce,that:
1. Planning is performed primarily to make decisions that commitresources, and secondarily to coordinate activities among multipleparticipants.
The decision might be to increase the staffing level by a shift, to make a certain amount ofan item next week, to replenish field inventory at a stocking location by a certain amount. Butthey are all decisions, and once made and acted on, there is a significant cost to reversing them.Identifying the decisions that have to be made is a key step in our methodology for rethinkingplanning processes.
Most of the value in better product flow planning...
