Unit 6: Two Business Scenarios
Business Scenario:
COVID-19 vs human resources
Description
The business scenario involves a company with 6 people working in its offices. The presence at the administration department is necessary to be able to carry out management tasks with the lorries that arrive daily. During the pandemic, the 6 office workers worked together in the same office, keeping the minimum safety distance and following all the safety protocols established by the company. However, one of the office workers tested positive for COVID and so the remaining 5 office workers had to stay home confined as a virus containment measure. Therefore, when this happened, there was no office worker present in the company, which meant that all the documentation for the trucks arriving for unloading and loading could not be managed, and chaos ensued in the company.
Resilient Response
Recovery. The immediate response of the company to try to minimise the negative effects of this crisis was to have the 5 office workers who were not ill work telematically from home and do all the documentation and send it to the company where it was printed by a worker from another department who did not have the right training to do these tasks, but at least they tried to manage the situation.
Preparedness. The company could not allow this to happen again, so after the days of confinement of the 6 office workers, the company implemented a new way of working in which 2 office workers worked on Mondays and Tuesdays in person, while the other 4 worked telematically, and so all the office workers were rotated, i.e. on Tuesdays and Wednesdays 2 other office workers worked in person while the other 4 were at home and so on. In this way, if someone got infected, there were always 4 other office workers available who could go to the office in person.
Business Scenario:
Re-formulation of the products composition
Description
In a plastic parts production plant, there were problems with the hardness of the plastic used to manufacture a family of products. Therefore, the production department carried out various tests and concluded that it was necessary to change the formulation in the composition of the products in order to be able to manufacture good quality products and that the plastic would not be brittle. However, this was a decision taken by the production department together with the new product development department, but was not communicated to the purchasing department. As the composition of the product changed, a raw material was consumed in greater quantities, and therefore, during the production of the product family, the production department ran out of raw materials to be able to continue production.
Resilient Response
Recovery. Once the purchasing department realised that there was not enough raw material to continue production, it began to investigate why more had been consumed than was actually due to the production plan it had defined. It was then that the purchasing department realised that the composition of the product had changed and had to take a series of actions to recover quickly so that the production lines would be stopped for the least amount of time. To this end, they placed an urgent order with express transport so that the raw material could reach them as soon as possible.
Preparedness. From this moment on, and so that this event would not happen again, every time the production department together with the new product development department modifies a product composition, a protocol has been defined so that an alarm is triggered in the purchasing department and the new product compositions are automatically updated so that purchasing can accurately plan the purchase of raw materials. A warning is also triggered in the finance department to analyse the cost impact of the new formulation on the product composition.
Summary and Takeaways
1.Based on the recovery and preparedness actions, it is more advisable to act as proactively as possible in order to avoid last-minute recovery actions.
2.It is recommendable to ask yourself what happens if… and then analyse the impact to take the proper decisions.
Check your understanding
1 Do you think there were more appropriate actions to recover from the lack of presence of office workers in the administrative department?
2 In addition to the purchasing department, which other departments do you think should be informed about the reformulation of product composition?