The word “control” often gets a bad rap, but without some sense of it, life quickly spirals.
In your manufacturing business, maintaining control is essential to ensuring functions including work-in-progress, regular production processes, and record keeping are done efficiently and with minimal error.
A modern software solution, such as Cim50 or Cim200, could help you solve any ongoing issues by:
- Maintaining control of costs
- Improving the management of stock
- Identifying potential problems before they arise.
Loss of control and the resulting consequences played a big role in the 1930s with global warfare, economic collapse, and a polarising political atmosphere (seems a bit familiar, doesn’t it?).
One war in particular stood out against the much more serious battlegrounds of Europe and Asia, and it involved Australia and its native population of emus – yes, the large flightless birds.
What initially seemed like a small and easily resolved issue, soon descended into a farce, and a major embarrassment for the Australian government and its military.
Read on to discover a few ways how “The Great Emu War” can teach you about the importance of maintaining control over your company’s key processes in an effort to reduce costs, gain oversight, and avoid simple issues escalating into embarrassing problems.
The Great Emu War saw Australia dispatch soldiers to eradicate 20,000 emus – and fail
Following the First World War, returning Australian soldiers were resettled in Western Australia and incentivised to develop the land for farming. However, the area already had a large local population albeit a non-human one.
Thousands of emus, large (often over six feet tall) flightless birds, flocked to the newly established farms in search of food, and trampled the crops along the way.
In 1932, a deployment of three soldiers from the Royal Australian Artillery armed with machine guns was dispatched to assist the farmers with culling 20,000 emus. It should have been a simple task, yet it quickly descended into chaos.
The Australian government, military, and local farmers severely underestimated their opponents.
In the first three days of the campaign, the soldiers only managed to kill 30 birds, as the emus broke away from larger herds and scattered at speed (adults being able to reach almost 50km/h). The birds adapted to their attackers, forming small “units” with “lookouts” that watched for approaching humans. They were also able to outrun and outmanoeuvre most vehicles across the challenging Outback terrain.
After nearly two months, the soldiers and farmers had only managed to kill around 2,500 birds, a fraction of their target. Public sentiment turned against them, as people became enamoured with the bird’s resilience, and soon the government was pressured into calling off the campaign in what the media coined “The Great Emu War”.
So, what can you learn from how the Australian government handled the emus, and the birds’ plucky response, about the importance of maintaining control within your business?
Ensuring you have the necessary control over your business could eliminate issues before they arise – CIM software could be the solution
The Australian government made several missteps both before and during The Great Emu War, such as:
- Failing to account for the environmental impact of moving thousands of farmers into Western Australia
- Underestimating the strength, speed, and intelligence of emus
- Lacking the patience to review potential alternative solutions to their problem
- Dispatching only a minimal force to tackle the issue that was ill-equipped for the task and the terrain
- Allowing problems to filter out into the general public and the media, causing major embarrassment.
Across your manufacturing business, you may have multiple pressure points that have the potential to cause issues should they not be handled with care and the right level of control.
This might involve:
Ensuring thorough planning occurs ahead of projects
Maintaining control of production costs for materials, labour, and machinery
Securing and allocating the necessary time for projects, and communicating it clearly across your team
Finding ways to keep a continuous cash flow across the business
Managing stock inventory, including finished products assigned to orders or components needed for in-house assembly of items.
An unexpected disruption or an avoidable error across any of these areas could quickly spiral into a much bigger issue, and one that could potentially lead to an embarrassing situation with your customers and additional costs.
Cim50 and Cim200 are incredibly useful manufacturing-focused add-ons for Sage financial software. While Sage’s accessible dashboards help provide you with a thorough overview of your business financials, the CIM add-ons could help you to gain greater control by:
Providing detailed, automated planning that reads demand from sales orders, sales forecasts, Works Orders and make to stock items, to ensure stock levels are correct based on reorder levels and existing stock records
Identifying potential steps you’ll want to take to meet demand within Cim200’s Material Resource Planning (MRP) and advising you on any potential purchases, assembly, or additional lead time you might require
Pulling key information from throughout the manufacturing process using the Bill of Materials (BOM) module to create an ongoing costing history, so that you can rest assured that your costs are always up-to-date and accurate
Allowing for capacity planning and component control through the Works Orders module, so that you can manage your in-house resources as needed and reserve component stock for jobs.
The added visibility, oversight, and overall system integration provided by Cim50 and Cim200 ensures you are able to operate efficiently with a smaller stock holding, boosting immediate cashflow, and reducing the potential for costly human errors during the manufacturing process.
The Australian government rushed into a situation without the proper planning and oversight, as well as an inability to identify potential issues, and quickly lost control of the situation.
Opting to utilise CIM software could help you ensure your business does the opposite, instead being as adaptable and resilient as the victorious emu.
Don’t let workplace issues ruffle your feathers – we’re here to help you find solutions
Once you’ve gained control of your firm’s key processes and benefited from the added clarity that follows, you’ll be better positioned to ensure your business continues to succeed and grow.
Cim50 and Cim200 are two potential software solutions that might offer you the kind of oversight required to resolve any lingering issues within your business, reduce recurring problems, and streamline costs. They could help your business become better connected throughout every step of the manufacturing process.
Read more: Finding clues and connections – how to solve the case of the missing profits
Our experts are here to guide you through the software’s various benefits and ensure that when you’re finally ready to make a decision, you can do so with confidence.
To get the conversation started, or potentially book a demo, you should email us at enquiries@solutionscloud.uk or call 0115 840 5075.
If you’re exasperated by recurring problems, don’t let them spiral into bigger issues. Use CIM software to take control of the situation today.
