As a human being, we all consume products and/or services all the time. This morning you got up and ate your breakfast, e.g., eggs, milk, bread, fresh fruits, and the like. After the breakfast, you drove your car to work or school. At your office, you used your computer, perhaps equipped with 27” LCD monitor. During your break, you drank a cup of coffee and played with your iPhone. So on and so forth. You probably take it for granted that you can enjoy all of these products. But if you take a closer look at how each of these products can be made and eventually delivered to you, you will realize that each one of these is no short of miracle. For example, which fruit do you like? Consider fresh strawberries. In order for the strawberries to be on your breakfast table, there must be numerous functions, activities, transactions, and people involved in planting, cultivating, delivering, and consuming strawberries. Moreover, all of these functions, activities, transactions, and people are connected as an integral chain, through which physical products like strawberries themselves and virtual elements such as information and communication flow back and forth constantly. By grouping related functions or activities, we have a supply chain, comprised of four primary functions such as supplier, manufacturer, distributor, and finally consumer. A supply chain is essentially a value chain. For the society or economy as a whole, the goal is to maximize value, i.e., to create satisfactory value without spending too much. In order to create the maximum value for the strawberry supply chain, every participant in the chain must carry out its function efficiently. In addition, all of the members must coordinate with each other effectively in order to ensure value maximization. We have to face the same issues for almost all the products and services we take for granted in our everyday life, e.g., cars, hamburgers, haircuts, surgeries, movies, banks, restaurants, and you name it! In this course, we want to understand fundamental principles of value creation for the consumers or the market. We try to answer questions like how the product or service is made, how the value-creating activities or functions are coordinated, who should play what leadership roles in realizing all these, and so on. As our course title hints, we approach all of these issues from a learning perspective, which is dynamic in nature and emphasizes long-term capability building rather than short-term symptomatic problem solving.
Learning Organization for SCM
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Do curso por Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
Gestão da cadeia logística: uma perspectiva investigativa
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Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
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Learning Perspective
Learning is an essential part of any creative activity. In this chapter, we will learn what the learning capability is and its dynamics in supply chain management. We will also look into the learning propensity model and how the learning processes influence the performance of a supply chain system.
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Bowon KimProfessor
KAIST Business School
As I emphasized several times, learning is at the
center of our discussion in supply chain management in this
course.
So I want to close today's lecture by discussing leaning organization.
Basically, learning organization is an organization
that is very good at learning.
And I think that the definition of learning
organization in this slide is pretty a generalizable one.
In other words, it's pretty general definition of learning organization.
But you will see how this generalized definition is actually
very close with the, the learning, we already defined as process.
Here the learning organization is an organization
skilled at creating, acquiring and transferring knowledge.
And we said that this is not just general
knowledge, only say that this is knowledge about cause,
cause and effect relationship among key managerial values.
And
also the learning must not stop
at transferring or acquiring or creating knowledges.
Because of that knowledge, because of the knowledge, the organization
must be able to change the behavior of its members, behavior of its imports.
So here, modifying the behavior is very important.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
And we also said that why we go through all this?
For the sake of knowledge, it's natural.
We want to create, acquire and transfer knowledge and modify
our behavior because eventually, we want to improve our performance.
So here, it says that improving actions, improving actions through better knowledge
and understanding and improve action, meaning
that we want enhance our performance.
So you see that the very general or generic definition of the learning
organization is pretty much consistent with what
we defined as a learning in operations.
And I think that this kind of organization or this kind of company will have
a very good comparative advantage, a very strong
competence when it comes to supply chain management.
So let's think about what are the, you know,
specific elements, its so-called the building blocks for learning organization.
I want to talk about very general things, and I think that we'll have
more time to talk about each one of these elements in great detail.
Basically, learning organization is good at the systematic problem solving.
And problem solving is at the center of all learning process, because this is
the way we improve our understanding about
this course and effective relationships, so problem.
Why, why that is a some problem?
Problem caused by some factors, so solving problem
meaning that what cause, what causes that problem?
So basically, it is about cause and effect relationship analysis.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
Experimentation with the new approaches.
This is also part of this learning, right?
Problem solving.
Remember what happened when you do this you know, degradation
analysis over [INAUDIBLE] we apply one, let's say, initial model, mental
model, and then we do some experimentation and we see the
what consequences we can have and so on and so forth.
And then we improve with the new mental model with the new approaches.
Sometimes it's possible that we learn from our own experience, right?
Yeah, learning by doing.
But if we try to learn everything in our own
way, then it would be too time consuming, and it would be too expensive.
Learning by doing is great way to learn,
but it's only one of those many learning paths.
So you also want to learn from other's experiences and other's best practices.
This is basically the benchmark,
right?
We learn things from others.
You see, basically, we have three ways
for this systematic problem solving.
Based on our own experience and history, learning from other's
experience and other's best practices, and then we can do some experimentation.
There is pretty way to do it simulation, right?
You want to do some simulated environment and simulation.
And also, learning organizations must be able to
transfer the knowledge quickly and efficiently throughout the organization.
In other words, it must not stop at the individual learning only.
It must [UNKNOWN] this individual learning into
organizational learning or team learning.
And I think that probably when we talk about the importance of a team
and team approaches in product innovation, as well as quality improvements.
Finally, let's think about this one, stages of learning.
What learning happens, how learning happens right, how learning happens
and what changes we must, we must you know, initiate.
Usually, the learning occurs at the cognitive level first.
In other words, people realize that learning something is very important.
People realized that doing this and that is important for the company.
Okay, that's cognitive change or cognitive level learning.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
But the true learning must have stopped at this cognitive level only.
In other words, even if people think that this certain methodology is good,
it is nothing unless they actually behave in a way consistent with that method.
For
example, even if the people believe that ERP
is a good tool to improve their performance.
But let's say, unfortunately, they don't know how to use ERP.
They don't like using ERP because using ERP somehow
reduces their authority or reduces their organization power or whatever.
In other words, if cognitive learning or cognitive level learning is not translated
into some behavior or change, it's nothing.
So if you think ERP is good, then you have to behave that way.
And how can, how can we make sure that
there is good transition from cognitive level to behavioral level?
[BLANK_AUDIO]
There's gotta be incentive, right?
Incentive alignment must be there.
You gotta give some incentive to the people, so
that the, they not just stay at the cognitive forever.
They should start behaving that particular way.
So that's called incentive alignment.
Here, incentive is not just monetary.
And as you probably know, that there
are two different types of motivational factors.
One is implicit motivation.
The other one is expressed motivation.
Expressed factor increase monetary values and so on and so forth.
Whereas implicit, meaning that there's
some emotional and psychological and spiritual.
Whatever you use, design your incentive mechanism so that the people just behave
in a way consistent with the way they think, the way they can see.
And now, I say that they could change the behavior, but you also make
sure that the behavior must translate into actual performance,
actual, let's say, performance improvements, right?
So I want to make sure that the
behavioral change must translate to a performance increasing.
Then, what happens?
What we need to have between these two?
In other words, here, you gotta have good infrastructure.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
For instance, let's say, you gotta have a very good IT
infrastructure in order to make sure that the behavioral change
should improve the possibilities of the organization, right?
So these are three areas.
Cognitive level learning, behavioral level learning and then
finally, there must be, they must drive the performance.
So measurable improvements in results.
Okay.
Today, we learned a lot, actually, in learning.
I define the learning from, [UNKNOWN] perspective.
And I showed you comparable mythologies or comparable approaches that
might help you to visualize this whole learning process, and that help
you to understand the importance of learning more effectively.
And then we talked about Chris Argyris's single loop versus double loop learning,
because that has pretty interesting implications
for the supply chain management as well.
And then we talked about the learning organization.
So, as you know that the title of this course is
supply chain management, a learning perspective,
that means that the [UNKNOWN] to
get the, the issues, issues in supply chain management, topics in supply
chain management, and problems in supply
chain management from the learning perspective.
What does that mean?
We wanted to get not just short term solutions, but also long
term, fundamental solutions that had course
to eliminate the [UNKNOWN] of the problems.
Supply chain management is not just an isolated event.
If we truly solve problems in supply chain management, we must be
able to look at the entire organization, entire cause and effect relationship.
And then we can find the divergent point where
we can solve the problem in the most effective way.
In that sense, learning and learning capabilities are really important.
And in the ensuing lectures, in the following lectures, we will actually, you
know, apply this learning perspective to this supply chain management
problem solving and improving supply chain management effectiveness, and you know,
you will see how these two, the learning theory and supply chain management
are actually very closely related to each
other and very closely connected with each other.
Okay, I hope you enjoyed this class, and I will see you next time as well.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
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