BUS603: Managing People

Before the prototype was used, the sub-process that was followed mainly used email as a groupware tool. At almost the end of every shift, it prepared a report of the summary of parts pending for replacement, and then sent the report to all teams involved. At the beginning of the following shift, a revision was conducted in order to know which parts will be available during the shift or still will be waiting for a further period of time. However, if a product (that it was waiting for parts), is considered critical or in a high priority, then the communication by e-mail was increased and this also increased the possibility of errors and mistakes, miscommunication, and then process losses. In fact, when there was a high demand for parts, it could happen that the participants look for other communication channels like phone calls, instant messaging (IM), and others, in order to quickly fulfill their needs, where sometimes not all participants and teams were informed or included in the agreements. In addition, this process has implicit many considerations like cycle-time consumption, performance losses, lack of real-time information, workload, lack of attention to detail, less reliable information, deficient historic data for quality analysis as others. All aspects mentioned before, for this particular sub-process.