Another Reflection Blog

Here comes another class reflection post. As a junior, I am finally starting to take classes that are directly related to my major. Going to a liberal arts college is cool and all, but I’m not a big fan of history. Or math. Or any of the sciences. But I do like business. Now that I’ve completed just about all of my Gen. Ed. Requirements, I can focus on my classes in the business school. I may have mentioned this in an earlier blog post, but I’m a Supply Chain and Finance double major in the business school at TCU.

            If you’re not familiar with supply chain, it’s basically the management of the flow of goods, money, and information between businesses. The goal is to make this flow as efficient, fast, and cheap as possible. This semester, I am taking a supply chain class called Systems Planning and Process Analysis. It’s a boring title, I know. But it has taught me a lot of things that I will need to know when I move into the work force.

            Anyways, in the beginning of the class we talked about bottlenecks in a business process. A bottleneck is a step in a process that is slower than all the others, like a particularly slow machine in a manufacturing plant. To avoid a buildup in work-in-process inventory (which increases carrying costs), a good manager has to be able to find these bottleneck and work around it. Basically, you can either slow down the rate inventory coming in to match the output of the machine, or you can find a way to increase the output of the machine. Either way, it has to be dealt with.

            To apply this to real life, I like to think of really tough situations, or homework assignments, or projects, or whatever as bottlenecks. This might sound cheesy, but you need to identify the bottlenecks in your life and manage them. One way to do this is to take care of the bottleneck, or homework assignment, first. In a manufacturing process, if it is possible to do so, putting the bottleneck machine at the beginning of the process will prevent an inventory buildup. Likewise, getting that homework or whatever taken care of before the other stuff will be a big relief and will allow you to focus on the other stuff.

            Actually, this principle of doing the hardest thing first was something I was taught a long time ago. It was at a leadership conference type thing. They called it “eating the big frog first.” Don’t ask why. As a TCU student aka a “horned frog” I find the term borderline offensive. Ok not really. Anyways, this advice comes from multiple sources, so it can’t be bad, right?

            We learned a lot of other stuff in that class, too. We learned all about different processes and methods to develop a system. Unfortunately, not a whole lot of it translates into life lessons (or maybe I’m just not trying hard enough). Ok, here’s one. When designing a system, one of the first things you have to do is “define the scope” of the project. Basically, you need to know exactly what you want the final product to look like. I think this is a lot like other projects in life. You need to know what you want the end product to look like before you start working on it. For example, who starts remodeling their kitchen without an idea of what they want it to look like? Yeah, there may be some changes along the way, but you should know what the basics are before jumping into a huge project like that.

            Ok, that’s all for now. Bye bye!