What’s Keeping You Up At Night?
Wednesday, August 6th, 2008 
I had a dream last night; ok to be honest it was nightmare. I actually awoke in a cold sweat. I was back working in a company with what my boss called a good problem to have. A new series of products aimed at a market that was growing like crazy. You know the kind I am talking about – 50% growth quarter over quarter. We were under pressure to keep increasing production and making our quarterly projections so that our publicly traded company could continue to grow market value and to remain in the position of darling in the eyes of the analysts.
As my subconscious mind recalled the challenges that I struggled with: lack of capacity planning and utilization metrics, training new management and operations associates, machine downtime and efficiency loss, material allocations from suppliers, changes in demand which causes increase machine change-over and more lost run time, design and testing issues which had to be worked out during the day time again causing loss of run time, IT down time causing production bottlenecks and well you get the picture…
It took me a few minutes to realize why I was putting myself through such an agonizing night. I had earlier in the day been introduced to the solution to all of my problems but only five years too late!
I had met my nightmare’s white knight: a closed loop Business Event Management Tool from one of my new alliance partners. Oh to be able to go back in time and apply a tool of this kind to my nightmare, I could have saved a headful of grey hair.
