"Make a clear list of contracts that everyone can follow and trust without exception. Plus unambiguous delivery dates. And a list of resource utilisation. These are the simple, yet often overlooked fundamentals of successful production planning outside the automotive industry."
Ondřej Komenda is the founder and director of the consulting company Simplementa and the software company inSophy. A physicist by training, he strongly believes in the inherent simplicity of things. As an experienced consultant, he now applies his analytical skills and experience in simplifying the world around him in dozens of manufacturing companies, where he and his colleagues optimize planning, purchasing, production management and pricing processes. With the experience from the real-life deployment of his advice, he also develops software tools for the aforementioned areas.
SIMPLEMENTA is a boutique consulting firm that has been helping manufacturing companies to eliminate errors in the planning and management gears since 2018. In doing so, it helps manufacturers dramatically increase profit potential and improve customer service. It helps companies improve the entire management chain from centralized forecasting, to timely purchasing and manageable order intake, to timely sourcing and optimized work queues.
With Ondra, who takes after his daddy as a production freak (which you can tell), we discuss in detail the state of the Czech industry. What questions will be asked during the interview?
🔸 What is the state of production planning and management in the Czechia?
🔸 When is improvisation in production a bad thing?
🔸 When does LEAN not work?
🔸 Where are the most common problems in production?
🔸 How to promote change in the company?
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Martin Hurych
Hello. I'm Martin Hurych and this is Zahžeh. Ignition is the beginning of acceleration, and it's something you need to get moving from a place. By tuning into this podcast, which I thank you for by the way, you've taken the most important step for your acceleration, which is the first step. In Ignition, we share experiences from B2B business, from business, from innovation, from working with people and other areas of corporate life. Today we're going to accelerate with Ondrej Komenda, owner and CEO of Simplementa, hi Ondrej, can you introduce the company, what do you do?
Ondřej Komenda
Hi, thank you so much for inviting me. Simplementa is a consulting firm. We also provide software tools and we struggle with complexity in the management planning process in manufacturing companies. Most manufacturing companies, but also service companies, have a kind of money-making engine inside them, and that engine is terribly complex and doesn't work efficiently to badly. We simplify that engine, we fine-tune it, and then companies make more money because of it.
Production planning and management is not sexy for many
Martin Hurych
That's exactly what I'm interested in, but how does one get into production planning and control? Because in today's connotations, it's not exactly a sexy topic.
Ondřej Komenda
Yes, production was hot around 1900, I'm aware of that. Most people who come to work for me say that's what they like about it. That in banks and telecoms you can't get to anything physical, in manufacturing that world is completely different. There it's still the case that if something is heavy and I can pick it up, it actually has value.
Martin Hurych
So what was your career path to production?
Ondřej Komenda
I am a physicist by training, I studied at the Faculty of Nuclear and Physical Engineering, and I was involved in the rather exotic field of laser tweezers and computer generated holograms. And from this field, where, as I indicated, I was really immersed in the world of physics, I took away a belief, an experience, that the world is simple. Whenever we see something complex in the context of a physics experiment or an attempt to understand a physical system, it is only this belief in simplicity that keeps us going in that exploration to ultimately say: This one equation will describe it all. Or: This algorithm here will solve it all.
When I was deciding what to do next after graduation, I convinced a few colleagues from school and together we started a company that aimed to bring this simplicity, but also the sophistication of mathematical models, to companies. We called ourselves the Studio for Applied Mathematics and Advanced Software Engineering, and we made sure that everyone understood what we were going to do, but of course no one did. Thanks to this intermediate stage, we got to work on a project at Celestica in Kladno, which introduced us to their wonderful mathematical problem, production planning.
When we saw the project, everyone in the company fell in love with it because everything is in production. There's this complexity that can be unraveled into simplicity, and then you need to borrow the more sophisticated math. So it was kind of the perfect combination of everything that we envisioned, and from 2007-2008, we gradually moved more towards being solely manufacturing experts. And now we haven't done anything else for a long time. We're actively working with 35 Czech manufacturing companies now, and we're really helping them to continually simplify and improve, to fine-tune their money-making engine. That manufacturing thing that caught me in 2007 hasn't let go yet. I recommend anyone who doesn't have the experience to get a whiff of manufacturing, because at least from my point of view, it's something that makes sense.
Martin Hurych
You've never been drawn into any fintech or AI or anything else? Cleaner for a lot of people?
Ondřej Komenda
I guess it's my dad, who was always in production. We would go and see him sometimes and walk the production floor, and this is the job for me, this is what makes sense, and I feel better there.
The state of production planning and control in the Czech Republic
Martin Hurych
When you walk through manufacturing plants like this, through halls, what do you see? What is the state of production planning and management in the Czech Republic and Slovakia?
Ondřej Komenda
The purpose of our company is to help companies simplify and fine-tune their engine. It follows that there is a lot to simplify and fine-tune, the state of planning and management is not ideal. On the other hand, those companies do a lot of things well. Some companies do great product development, some companies do great business, some companies have wonderful technologists who can do magic, and that planning and production management for those companies is kind of the ball on the leg. The state of the processes that we help with is not quite good.
The classic case that I present to the management of that particular manufacturing company is that most manufacturing companies promise deadlines by looking out the window, or by looking into a crystal ball. And they all laugh, ask if I've been there yet, and show me the window they're looking through or the crystal ball they got for their birthday last year.
The state of planning and management in most companies is an evolutionary one; the truly functional engine in each of those companies was created gradually. From a five-headed, ten-headed, fifteen-headed company to where today most manufacturing companies I meet have, between a hundred, five hundred people actually creating value on the shop floor. Then it's very clear that what worked for ten people, despite trying to improve it evolutionarily, doesn't work perfectly for 300 people, for 500 people. The situation is not optimal, but most Czech factory workers are very open-minded people, and they don't want to start in months or years, they want to start on Monday.
Martin Hurych
Do you see any correlation to the average age of the machinery? Because you said it's built into the manufacturing company, the way it started out small, grew, didn't change processes, so where is the main obstacle, that unlike say product development, trading, where innovation and shifts are visible, even in my experience, in manufacturing it's mostly stagnant.
Ondřej Komenda
It correlates with what I always try to convey to those owners, directors. The moment I want a great product, in quotes, I just hire a great product team and basically locally create a great product. When I'm trying to do a better deal, I just focus on the store, it takes over some new market, saturates it with communication and I have a chance again. But the moment I'm trying to organize the planning and management of that whole chain, I have to coordinate several somewhat incompatible departments. I always liken it to the fact that the business, the technology, the warehouse, ultimately the individual production machines work great, but together these four here... I liken it to the amazing rockets that Musk is putting into space. It's just that you need all four of them to go up at the same time, and that's where the companies fail, because they've got these rockets perfectly polished side by side, but they've got them tied together with twine.
On the one hand, on the 21st century, maybe almost the 22nd century, even in small companies you see machines that make my chin drop, for example a machine with a laser, what it can do is unreal. But then when I ask how it is determined what the laser is supposed to do, I find that we are in the 19th century. Either the operator determines it, or they determine by what they find that burns, and they quickly go to put it on that machine. They always end up making it and delivering it, but unfortunately it's not in the most profitable way. As you asked about the machinery, and how that relates, manufacturing has an awful lot in common with, say, a large hospital from that perspective. You come to a big hospital, a wonderful doctor, an even more wonderful X-ray, but in the meantime you're crawling around, always waiting somewhere, carrying papers, what somebody told you, that's approximately how I personally see production, but something can be done about it. And the trick is just to understand the principle, how it all works, and then to simplify and fine-tune it.
When is improvisation a bad thing?
Martin Hurych
We Czechs are used to improvising. Isn't that exactly against what we should be doing at the moment? Because what you said: We're gonna make it anyway and satisfy the customer somehow. I hear that a lot with my clients. When I ask who feeds the company, I hear very often in manufacturing companies that it's manufacturing. On the other hand, I don't see that it is often given priority attention. Where is the buried dog?
Ondřej Komenda
You just said some very interesting things and I'm going to try to break it down.
The first point is that Czechs are used to improvising. It's their super ability, unfortunately within production systems, from a certain size upwards, uncontrolled improvisation is counterproductive. And I always give the analogy of an intersection that's controlled by a genius cop who will improvise, he'll probe who's trying to get where, where they're trying to get to, and there's these cars honking on all sides. And the cop is a real dude, he stands there 12 hours a day, and determines which car is going to jump over which, he'll invite 6 guys to move some car to the middle of the intersection, and it could go on. So that's roughly the system of driving by improvisation. And the alternative that most of those manufacturing companies had experienced before was the Indian intersection where everybody honks their horn and drives over each other. But I say to them, the alternative to the policeman is not going to be an Indian intersection, but a roundabout where the whole thing is self-driving, and where the cars just drive through, and the policeman just stands there and looks to see if anybody's speeding and if the cars have bumped into each other. And from that point of view, of course, it's always a lot of work to enforce that idea. Then the planners, the production managers, the foremen finally come back after a year and say how much better their lives are, that they don't go home after 10 p.m. anymore and they can take a vacation.
Improvisation still has its place here, but it's that it's improvisation within a set system, and if we leave room for it, it's in the sense of deciding between three options, not inventing a whole new world. That's what's killing these companies today.
Martin Hurych
So improvisation is supposed to be improvisation, not standard.
Ondřej Komenda
Exactly, improvisation should occur at the moment when the process has failed, that's one option, or then improvisation is possible at the moment we localize it. I'll liken it to, I can have a car like a Tesla that drives all by itself, and in that case improvisation is zero because one can sleep slowly there. And then the other world, where I just put a GPS in my car, and it tells me to drive 200 km straight down the highway. And I'm the one who, by my improvisation within those confines, drives 200 km straight, and the car drives, overtakes, and pumps gas.
In some companies, a stock of five contracts makes sense. The process and the rule there is that the order of those five orders is decided by the person standing on that machine. But those five orders from a stack of 60 are chosen by the system, by the process, and that actually brings us back to the fact that we have boundaries within which someone is making improvisational, to some extent responsible decisions, because that is the advantage of human reason. One can take into account things that processes and systems cannot. But from a certain size up, we have to keep that improvisation at bay and we have to make sure that we don't mess up the system, that trying to improve one place doesn't compromise and mess up the rest of the system.
When does LEAN not work?
Martin Hurych
What is the situation across sectors? Are there cops everywhere or do we already have roundabouts somewhere?
Ondřej Komenda
In the automotive industry, which is quite strong in the Czech Republic, there is a very strong lean manufacturing, LEAN, kaizen movement. And these are companies that have made building roundabouts a very high priority, and it works wonderfully there. The problem is that these lean manufacturing concepts, at least in my opinion and experience, work well when the system is relatively simple in terms of the external specification. That is, if a manufacturing company within the automotive industry is supplying 100 different products to its customers, it is then conceivable that we have built 5 lines that can each convert to one of 20 products, and I basically run the whole company using the method that I know I can produce 20,000 specific products per day and I can easily do the math. But at the point where the company is lower down that supply chain, and the job is more complex in that, for example, orders are constantly changing, or I'm not in a completely strong position vis-à-vis the suppliers, then it's easy to find that they were supposed to deliver a sheet on Monday, and on Monday I find that there's nothing in stock, and on Thursday I'm still just trying to convince them. So suddenly it's a company where the processes have to be much more responsive to that variability, and the classic lean manufacturing methods don't lend themselves as well to that. Then there are these islands where you walk onto the shop floor and all you see are roundabouts, if I can keep that simile. And then there are companies where you walk in and all you see are cops, and the most amusing to me are the companies that are always trying to make roundabouts from six to eight in the morning, and then they can't stand the tension anymore, the cops come running in and start saying: No, no, no, don't do that, do something else, and the CEO gets a call from a customer saying if it's not done today, it's trouble. So it all starts to change again very quickly.
At this level, there are some specialty companies here whose world works nicely, but others can't quite nail it because they have a much broader production, more custom production, a much more complex process before the product finally gets out the door. It's typical that the average company needs to do 30 to 50 operations on a product before it gets to the customer. It's made up of dozens of different inputs, and the resulting number of products they can produce at the end, a simpler company has thousands of them, a more complex company effectively infinite, because every order is an original.
Martin Hurych
From what you're saying, I would be very wrong if I understood that you specialize a lot in engineering manufacturing?
Ondřej Komenda
Not so, although of course engineering companies are easy to come across. Within the Czech Republic, I am most likely to come across an automotive company, the second one is a machine shop, etc., but basically we are not specialized in any particular field. We just know that in some areas the process to which that company management process has evolved is more pressing or has worse problems than elsewhere. So, for example, in chemical manufacturing or food manufacturing in the sense of, say, a brewery, my analogy of rockets tied with string doesn't apply so much because it's one huge facility. There it all flows at once, so here these one-step, albeit terribly complex step production, usually don't meet us because their primary problem is the technology.
Martin Hurych
Okay, it's in the planning.
Ondřej Komenda
Exactly, but the companies that make furniture are engineering companies of all kinds that make their own products, produce or supply co-operative production. That is, they make arrangements for somebody else that technologically they can deliver one or two operations in a week. Printers or companies that in turn supply servicing to printers, those are the companies that we meet and I have to say that I routinely walk in the door and hear: But Mr Komenda, we are specific.
Martin Hurych
It's the same in the store. They're all specific.
Ondřej Komenda
I can imagine. They're specific in that in each of those companies there's a different type of cop at a different intersection, using different methods, but when I look at it from a simplistic point of view, there's someone with the soul of a physicist standing there saying: It can't be that complicated. And it goes floor by floor to lower and lower levels to that conceptual model of how a company makes money, and in that, the companies are very similar, and that's our advantage, that's what our years of experience are good for. Because even though on the surface the companies are different, the logic inside is still the same. And even though I hear at the beginning that they're specific, then when I show the slide where the person is looking into the crystal ball or out the window, everybody says: You're right, okay, we're specific, but this is what we have.
Where are the most common problems in production?
Martin Hurych
When you look at the types of companies that need you, you look at them, as I say, door-to-door, and something comes in, something gets produced, something flows back out, where are the most common problems?
Ondřej Komenda
We really look at the world as if it were an engine, i.e. we look at it by reasoning that if all the pistons don't work, the engine just stops. When one piston is working, all the others are suddenly in motion. So I wouldn't presume to say where it's toiling the most, but I'm happy to share those places that we focus on as candidates that we then select from.
The engine, as we perceive it, must always start with the acceptance of the order. Accepting an order in most companies is the act of deciding what term to accept the order with. Companies are different, they are specific, in some companies the customer pushes more for a specific deadline, in some cases the company decides, in some cases, see for example the automotive one, appeals are sent where the customer dictates how it will be based on a contract signed two years ago. But in all of these cases, this is the flow to the company, and you need to write the right date in there, because if you write it wrong and you commit your company to delivering it on the wrong date, then everything is already messed up. You can't salvage it anymore because then you have to deal with multiple costs, you have to do it on a Saturday, send it in some urgent way, and get that sheet metal somewhere that maybe you don't have at the moment. So, at the beginning is taking orders.
The second point is that something always goes wrong in production, and that's why we resort to improvisation. Because they say: It doesn't matter how we come up with it on Monday, it's the same on Wednesday. We'll make ten rejects, this machine breaks, this sheet metal we find out it's the wrong quality, and somebody doesn't come to work. We also need to monitor whether and how the company is continuously checking that what we have promised is still manageable, because the world is changing.
The other point that is always there, and which we're looking at as a potential candidate for simplification, is the moment when I'm trying to prepare for the future. Because I've promised something, I've got the resources to do it, but my business strategy, for example, says my technology takes 3 weeks, but I'd like to deliver products to customers in 2 weeks. So I'm putting things into production that nobody has ordered yet, because I believe somebody will order them. And this is a little bit different in every company, we call it forecasting and pre-production, and that's where it can go wrong, it can be the piston that then pulls all the other ones down.
Then last but not least, but from the customer's point of view it's at the end, is tasking in the sense: We have these machines and these people on the shop floor, and now we need to tell them what to do in the morning from six to eight on this machine, from eight to eleven on that machine, and how to move it between those machines. These tasks or queues of work, tasks or instructions for warehouse workers, that's an area where we typically look for a candidate for complexity. And when I've gone through it all like that, from taking the order, to perpetual inspection and sourcing, to managing the pre-production, to that tasking, this is typically the process that when we go through that company, we learn where they've gone in an evolutionary way. In most companies, it's a wonderful example of a system that has some intelligence of its own that will cover the biggest problems, except for 20 to 30% of what gets done or somehow solved afterwards. It's just that the problem here is that it's at least these 4 steps that build on each other. Of course, each of them is made up of sub-steps, so that 20% left to chance at each point effectively means that no job is delivered without at least a little improvisation. We usually do this in the form of a planning audit. We get the CEO, the owner, the production manager, the purchasing manager, the chief technologist in a conference room and we talk about this chain. And around that table, these people sit and say: Well, if this is how you do it, no wonder this is what I do. And vice versa: You're running it like that, that's not possible. These people ask how somebody does what, and then they say that something should probably be done about it, that it sounds very complicated and broken. And that's where the sequence comes in, which we've worked out over time as a methodology. We say: We need to understand how it is, and then we need to pick one area to change. That is, we have to identify what to change, then what to change it to, and then we have to enforce that change. Then it's a terribly fundamental decision that we're going to change one thing at a time. And they say: Wait, it's broken here, here, here. And I say, I know, but if that group of people try to change more than one thing, then nothing will happen, and instead we'll have a whole breakdown, so...
Martin Hurych
We are returning to the Indian crossroads.
Ondřej Komenda
That's right. On the contrary, what will happen is that six independent cops will come in and just run things in a confused manner. So the approach that we take in simplifying it is always to go the other way from the way it was created. That is, it came about evolutionarily, that is, gradually, so to fix it, to simplify it, it has to be done gradually as well. But we have found that telling people to change from tomorrow doesn't work. People have to figure it out for themselves, they have to accept it, then they have to accept it in themselves, accept the idea as their own, and in the end we can really shift that one aspect of the company in some way.
Martin Hurych
That's what I was going to ask, because when you show them what could be done about it, that's a completely different task than pushing those changes through the company afterwards. I often hear: Well, yeah, but there's Marushka, she's been doing it for 20 years like this, and it's not going to work. So how do you fight the fact that people have to change, they have to change their procedures, changing a procedure at the beginning requires blood, sweat and tears, and people don't want that. How do you go against that, or how do you make those people take ownership, start changing the business?
Ondřej Komenda
Maybe it's the environment, maybe the same process would work in a bank for all the changes, but what really happens for us is that when we identify together with those people how the company works, when they say where it's broken, and then when we identify together where it's most broken, the people who are most broken, and they've figured it out for themselves, the other colleagues say they're having a really hard time, and the motivation is really strong. And we have this internal rule that when this energy arises, when this belief is there, we have 3-4 months to really change it, because then the initial enthusiasm wears off. We use agile methods, which also came out of industrial engineering, although they're probably more common today in banks, for example. We say: Okay, here's how it is now, it's wrong, we want to get here, we don't quite know all the details, let's start from tomorrow, and every week we'll work on it here together, we have homework, and in 3 months we have to fix this particular point. And just by picking one single area to improve, the one area that hurts the most, we have the potential to ride the Pareto rule that with relatively little energy, just 3 months, we can absolutely rocket this company because we're going to fix the place where the engine has been working the hardest.
Martin Hurych
And they see the results.
Ondřej Komenda
And they see the results, it fills them with energy, and that's when we have to slow down and go a little counter-intuitive: Now the energy is there and we want to keep changing, keep improving, but we have to slow down a little bit, we've changed one thing, but the company has to absorb it. The worst thing that can happen is to have a yo-yo effect, where everyone is excited, it's used for a week, then it starts to gradually decline, and in the meantime we start improving something else, i.e., we've actually messed up the job completely.
Martin Hurych
God forbid something breaks in there. You'd hear about it: I told you so.
Ondřej Komenda
Exactly, and always at the end of the day, even though those people have to be enthusiastic and make the change, there will always be 10% of people who say it won't work, and you must not let those people have a say, you must not give them arguments that might reduce the impact of the change. Usually we make one change and then we stabilize, and once the company is operating at that higher performance, we come up with another change, then another. And this is where it takes a lot of communication, it's difficult towards the owner, towards the CEO, because the CEO, when he sees where it's wrong everywhere, he wants it fixed as soon as possible. But you need to stabilize, then only go one step higher.
Martin Hurych
Do you do this purely at the process level, or do you have a toolbox that you deploy to these companies to make the change even feasible?
Ondřej Komenda
I mentioned at the beginning, Simplementa is a company that is primarily a consultancy, but our goal is to get to a state where the engine is simplified and fine-tuned. And the moment we find software tools or management tools in the company that just need to be realigned, we'll do that. But in most companies you need to add some extra cog to that management engine, and we have a whole optimization platform, we call it Plant You, it's cloud-based software that we always put together like a Lego exactly the tool that that particular company needs. What we're trying to fix is that marketers are promising terms by looking out the window, so we'll build a tool that's in the form of a mobile app, the customer taps in: I want 60 units of this on October 15th. And with a change as minimalist as one extra tool, the company gets the most rusty piston moving and we move on. With retailers in particular, you need to multiply that stabilization phase by two or three, because every retailer that gets the information that it's going to be that October 15th, they respond to the customer at the beginning: It says October 15, but don't worry, I'll try to work it out in that production, it's clear to me that you would want it on October 1. And I understand the salesman, on the other hand, this is something that if we leave it alone, and even after the tool is delivered it's done the old-fashioned way, we're not going to get any benefit. So we do deliver tools, I just didn't emphasize it because I don't like to be perceived by the factory people as software people because yes, usually some software is left behind, it's part of the company and it's visible, but if we just put it out there like that, nothing happens.
Martin Hurych
I would go back to the humorous nudge of production versus business. I see a lot of times: I'm not doing well, businessmen, bring in the orders. The shopkeepers will go out, sweat their shirts, bring something, let's assume it's also what the factory would actually like to produce. Suddenly the factory stops making the orders, and that pisses off the customers, and then the next meeting, the next instruction is: We don't have any orders, traders, bring the orders. And of course they're upset because they can't go where they were, and the market is slowly saturating. What do we do about it?
Ondřej Komenda
This is an absolutely beautiful symptom of a malfunctioning engine. It's one of many, but this is the most common. And just as in the case of diseases where the symptom is not the disease but the manifestation of the disease within, so in this case the treatment must be towards the engine. Because what you've just described could very well be caused at any of those stages, for example, by poor pre-production management, poor tasking of people, or traders getting contracts but promising unworkable deadlines.
How to promote change in the company?
Martin Hurych
Let's go all the way to the top, what should be my first reaction or first two or three steps, since I'm absolutely sick of this as a director, as an owner? I don't want to listen to both sides of the argument anymore, I want to have a thriving business. What should I start doing to untangle this gradually? We always end up with a 3-5 point recommendation here. What would it take in your case to start untangling this ball?
Ondřej Komenda
There's always the option of having the owner, the director call me. I'm happy to talk to him for 20 minutes on the phone, but if he wants to take those steps on his own, what I recommend, what I'm looking at, are the exact points I've talked about here. Just sending the traders out to get some contracts is an inadequate assignment. In a manufacturing company, every order sells a wide variety of products or resources at once. So it's similar to going to the supermarket and wanting to put 16 different things in my cart. And someone else wants to put 18 different things in there. If each of those orders needs something different, one needs 8 hours of laser, 2 hours of saw, 6 rolls of sheet metal, another needs a bender, a paint shop, and another sheet metal, then it's clear that when those retailers are looking for those orders in an uncoordinated way, what happens is that they sell out of some of those items and they have others left over. Similar to a supermarket that starts to run out of Coca Cola, but the rolls are sold out, so the supermarket makes the rolls more expensive, starts buying more of them, and in turn cheapens the Coca Cola or puts it on sale, and orders less of it.
Effectively a company makes money the moment a salesman arranges a contract not only in the sense that hard to sell is easy to produce. But in the sense that there must also be resources available to that firm. And that's something that those firms don't have control over, although they used to have it data-driven. It's a thing that's admittedly difficult to enforce because it's about those salespeople who we have to change the mindset that they can't sell absolutely anything, but they actually have to choose from what's profitable for the company at the time. Which makes sense, but it goes against everything that the salesperson has in his or her head. I'm convinced that in a small company, a smart owner with Excel can get to level 1. He can constantly keep track of what existing orders he's sold out, what he still has available. He can tell salespeople what to sell now and what not to sell because they just ran out. But within manufacturing companies, nobody thinks like that because it's all so complex there that nobody sees that sheet metal, packaging, and machine capacity is actually all one resource in a way, or that you can think of everything as a resource that can be sold out, which when it runs out, I have to sell something else. And this is where I would always start.
The second place I would look, and this is also very common, is that very often in manufacturing companies there is no list of orders with deadlines. When we ask for a list of what the company has committed to deliver, in what quantity and by when, that list is often not there. That takes what is ERP, then a lot of the deadlines are not meant seriously, and the salespeople have that in a notebook somewhere, then there are orders that are actually not meant seriously at all, in the scheme: If there's time left, no customer wants that, it's coming to our warehouse. But at the same time, from looking at the list, it's not clear-cut. So the most key, the data table that any company has, and that's the order list, and those companies don't have enough order in it.
And we'll untangle again how they got there evolutionarily. They had an effort in the beginning to record all contracts accurately, but then there were appeals that are not clearly describable by contract and it would have to be changed every day. So it's just written in as it came in, someone next door in Excel keeps track of it. They used to offer them a manufacturing module at the time, but it was too expensive or difficult to implement, so what they do is the retailer orders a product in their name so it's in stock, and it's not like the customer needs it by that date, if it's there a week later or 3 weeks earlier, nothing happens, and now it's all in one pile. This then leads to the fact that when we task these people, the cop standing there in the middle of the intersection is not only looking at a list that says exactly who needs to be where, when and making it up. He even makes up the list ad hoc, and then he's there: This one is 80% valid and Monday morning, this one is valid on Tuesday, but beware, there are pink exceptions. That then means, of course, that the person that I put in the middle of that intersection is the data rescuer, and he's managing and scheduling the individual resources, but in the end, the simple question of whether we're keeping up can't be answered, because if I don't know when I'm supposed to be there, I don't know exactly what all I'm supposed to deliver by when, I can't answer whether the resources that I have are enough to do it.
And that's the second place I'd look, and with the complexity of the simple advice in the end I'd be more likely to say: There's a cell phone on the simplementa.cz website. I'm happy to talk for 20 minutes with anyone who's been brave enough to manage production. I like these people, I like to talk it through with them, and this general advice of mine is relatively easy to translate into the specific because of that 15 years of experience.
Martin Hurych
And you're having a lot of fun.
Ondřej Komenda
I'd have to say it is. The corona ride was weaker now, but I'm looking forward to getting it back up to speed.
Martin Hurych
I can see you enjoy it, I'm glad you enjoy it, and I'm glad I could have you here.
Ondřej Komenda
I thank you very much for inviting me again.
Martin Hurych
This was Ondřej Komenda from Simplementa. If we've sparked you together and you feel like doing something with production planning and management, we'd love to hear from Ondřej. If you're interested in Ignition, look for more episodes, either on YouTube or your favorite podcast app, and be sure to check out my website www.martinhurych.com, where not only will this episode be on, but there are other free accelerator tools. Thanks for your attention, fingers crossed, and best wishes for success.
(Shortened, edited, automatically translated by DeepL)