Closed loop system definition

What defines elite companies from the competition? Value added activities, for starters. Especially those that assist in supplying products and services to the market. Closed loop management systems offer this advantage and embrace end-to-end production activities to achieve success.

Definition

A closed-loop management system is a management system that promotes a controlled base of both preferred outcomes and feedback from the system. Implementing this management system would mean that business activities such as inventory levels, production schedules, and supply chain functions are guided not just by the sales team of continued forecasts and orders, but rather includes feedback from ongoing operations from across many business units. This common style is different from the open loop management systems, which support zero feedback and have all inputs driven off of set calculations designed around anticipated outcomes only.

Companies who choose to adopt and implement the closed-loop management system facilitate the capacity to avoid many shortfalls.The closed loop consists of five stages:

• Discovery: This involves identifying internal tools, procedures, and ideas such as the mission and vision statements, SWOT analysis, competition analysis, and core capabilities to articulate a strategy statement.
• Modeling: The platform above is in turn modeled into objectives and initiatives, utilizing additional tools and procedures which should include flow charts and key performance indicators.
• Deployment: The deployment stage will link the strategy to the physical operation and a third set of tools and procedures such as quality management, process improvement, engineering, forecasting, planning and budgeting.
• Monitoring: As deployment pushes forward, necessary monitoring continues to evaluate and understand data and the business environment.
• Optimization: In the last stage, teams begin to evaluate strategies and optimize a key component which in turn begins another loop.

Closed Loop Management System Advantages

The use of a closed loop management system provides some key advantages to the business: visibility, compliance, and decision support.

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Visibility

The ability to use feedback from ongoing operations provides the closed loop management system with increased visibility. A common issue faced in operations is the time and money spent in optimization and execution utilizing inefficient data that leads to poor results and reduces the ability to achieve goals. Closed loop management system increases the real-time view of processes and grants a more dynamic response approach for the business.

Compliance

Compliance is a critical factor for trading partners, trade, and regulatory laws. The closed loop management system allows for necessary alerts to issues which enables the business the agility to determine impact and perform cause analysis to identify corrective actions. This ability not only supports the improvement processes within the operation, but ensures products and services are in compliance with the expectations of its users.

Decision Support

Closed loop management system promoted increased visibility to the entire operations processes, which is essential to supporting ongoing decisions. There are many obstacles that create havoc in production and limit the ability to achieve the highest of quality, but these challenges are overcome with the constant visibility which is a main factor in utilizing data and feedback from the system to support important business decisions.