I have been working in custom steel fabrication for most of my career, and our distributions are all fat-tail distributions. The main trick we've learned is to focus on and obsess over outliers at every stage of moving through our shop. If something has been sitting for more than three days, it's brought up in every meeting until it's moving again.
The hardest part to communicate to accountant types and management types (especially if they come to our company from a manufacturing background) is that our system is and always will be a chaotic system, and therefore inherently unpredictable.
The reason we are a chaotic system is because the base element in our system is a person, and people have inherently chaotic productivity output.
Another major contributor to the chaos is the Pareto distribution among workers of productivity. When scheduling plans a task to take 10 hours, what they can't account for is that if employee A does it, it will take 4 hours, and if employee B does it, it will take 25 hours.
I could go on and on with other layers of complexity that create long fat-tail distributions for us, but you get the point.
The hardest part to communicate to accountant types and management types (especially if they come to our company from a manufacturing background) is that our system is and always will be a chaotic system, and therefore inherently unpredictable.
The reason we are a chaotic system is because the base element in our system is a person, and people have inherently chaotic productivity output.
Another major contributor to the chaos is the Pareto distribution among workers of productivity. When scheduling plans a task to take 10 hours, what they can't account for is that if employee A does it, it will take 4 hours, and if employee B does it, it will take 25 hours.
I could go on and on with other layers of complexity that create long fat-tail distributions for us, but you get the point.