6|Rebel Alliance Empowering as an Holonic System |
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Rebel Alliance Empowering as an Holonic System: a model for the building of inter-organizational, multi-disciplinary Cooperative Virtual Enterprise to compete in the Digital Contents Industry.
The industrial company today has to face the problems relative to speed and efficacy of processes’ gestation, in presence of frequent disturbs and changings in the production orders. The management of the Supply Chain (SCM) has to keep in mind the these tendencies and find an organizational-mamagerial paradigm capable of giving to the company agility and the capability of synchronizing the logistic-productive system with new characteristics of the market.
Neither the hierarchic systems nor the heterarchical ones are capable of satisfying these requirements, having a lack of the necessary agility the first and a lack of capability of granting the necessary predictability to synchronization the second.
The idea of an Holonic System (Koestler, 1967), developed to describe certain structures widespread in the world of Nature, can be applied to the world of the companies as a model to describe a systematic configuring which is highly flexible, reactive and adaptive.
The end of the last century has seen the evolution and the affirmation of new technical, economic and social contexts in which enterprises are operating today. The stiff model of Ford-Taylor like structures, starting from the 70’s, has found to be no longer applicable.
Mass production, which demonstrated to have a positive response to situations of stability and constant growth, started to show it’s failures in unstable and morphing contexts.
The hierarchical organization model, based on the mass production system, forecasted, in fact, the constancy of social, economic and technologic factors. Starting from the 80’s the business and productive success of Japanese manufacturing companies, especially in automotive, lead to a turning point in the whole management philosophies and production techniques which were then renamed as “lean” or “slim”
However, as Taichi Ohno [1] predicted, the “Just In Time” approach showed his application difficulty outside of the Japanese archipelago (Monden 1998), or anyway not enough to accept the challenges of the competition arena of the 21st century. The diffusion of the Internet, from the 90’s, made possible the use, by the companies, of a worldwide informational structure which is low cost and highly efficient, which is still now promoting development. This development, together with the social transformations which marked the end of the past century, lead to today’s levels of complexity of the socio-economic environment, so of the markets and supply chains.
The increase of complexity identifies with the increase of variety, of morphing and of the non-predictability of the phenomena which characterized the environment in which the company operates.
The lines of growth of complexity are grouped in three categories: economy, technique and socio-psychology (Merli and Saccani, 1994). From the first, the factors of changing in the scope of relations which involve the economic actors as the increase of dimension of business, low increasing rate, high inflation rates, the “service-industry-wiseness” (the society that moves towards the service industry) and the heterogeneity of demand.
Rebel Alliance as an Holarchy
The Holonic [2] approach is the second of the concepts (after the empowerment) from which we got inspired for the definition of the Rebel Alliance management & production model.
Rebel Alliance is an Holarchy! Which is a global entity organized in cross-relations between operative units with a high rate of self-regulation and capable of cooperating one another, keeping their autonomy, visiting shared results and common aims [3].
The industrial company today has to face the problems relative to speed and efficacy of processes’ gestation, in presence of frequent disturbs and changings in the production orders. The management of the Supply Chain (SCM) has to keep in mind the these tendencies and find an organizational-mamagerial paradigm capable of giving to the company agility and the capability of synchronizing the logistic-productive system with new characteristics of the market.
Neither the hierarchic systems nor the heterarchical ones are capable of satisfying these requirements, having a lack of the necessary agility the first and a lack of capability of granting the necessary predictability to synchronization the second.
The idea of an Holonic System (Koestler, 1967), developed to describe certain structures widespread in the world of Nature, can be applied to the world of the companies as a model to describe a systematic configuring which is highly flexible, reactive and adaptive.
The end of the last century has seen the evolution and the affirmation of new technical, economic and social contexts in which enterprises are operating today. The stiff model of Ford-Taylor like structures, starting from the 70’s, has found to be no longer applicable.
Mass production, which demonstrated to have a positive response to situations of stability and constant growth, started to show it’s failures in unstable and morphing contexts.
The hierarchical organization model, based on the mass production system, forecasted, in fact, the constancy of social, economic and technologic factors. Starting from the 80’s the business and productive success of Japanese manufacturing companies, especially in automotive, lead to a turning point in the whole management philosophies and production techniques which were then renamed as “lean” or “slim”
However, as Taichi Ohno [1] predicted, the “Just In Time” approach showed his application difficulty outside of the Japanese archipelago (Monden 1998), or anyway not enough to accept the challenges of the competition arena of the 21st century. The diffusion of the Internet, from the 90’s, made possible the use, by the companies, of a worldwide informational structure which is low cost and highly efficient, which is still now promoting development. This development, together with the social transformations which marked the end of the past century, lead to today’s levels of complexity of the socio-economic environment, so of the markets and supply chains.
The increase of complexity identifies with the increase of variety, of morphing and of the non-predictability of the phenomena which characterized the environment in which the company operates.
The lines of growth of complexity are grouped in three categories: economy, technique and socio-psychology (Merli and Saccani, 1994). From the first, the factors of changing in the scope of relations which involve the economic actors as the increase of dimension of business, low increasing rate, high inflation rates, the “service-industry-wiseness” (the society that moves towards the service industry) and the heterogeneity of demand.
Rebel Alliance as an Holarchy
The Holonic [2] approach is the second of the concepts (after the empowerment) from which we got inspired for the definition of the Rebel Alliance management & production model.
Rebel Alliance is an Holarchy! Which is a global entity organized in cross-relations between operative units with a high rate of self-regulation and capable of cooperating one another, keeping their autonomy, visiting shared results and common aims [3].
[1] Creator of Toyota’s “Just In Time” philosophy
[2] The idea of Holonic approach comes from the principles postulated from Arthur Koestler in his book “The Ghost in the Machine” of 1967. Kostler’s intuition is clear: in the analysis of the universe, biologically and physically, we have to keep in mind the relation between the whole and the parts of the entities which are the objects of observation. To comprehend the functioning of the world we don’t have to limit to study atoms, molecules, cells, systems or individuals as autonomous and independent entities but we always have to consider that each of these units as simultaneously a whole themselves and as a part of a bigger whole: this is an HOLONE. The term holone is a combination of the Greek “ὅλος”, meaning “all”, with the suffix “ὄν” that means entity or part; so, the whole is formed by “parts” which, in distinguish with atoms, are entities themselves. For Koestler, the holone is intended as a whole which is part of a bigger whole and which comprehends, simultaneously, elements or “sub-parts” which build it and gives it a structural and functional significance. Holons act as autonomous entities and, at the same time, they cooperate to the structure of hierarchies (called HOLARCHIES), apparently self-constructing, of systems and sub-systems. An holarchy can be defined as: a hierarchy of self-regulating holons which work as autonomous, pre-commanded wholes in relation to their parts or as dependent parts in subordination to the control of the upper levels and anyway always coordinated with their environment. So, the holon do not match with any other observed or hypothesized structure, it is not the structure but it is the a part of the structure as its center of relations with other component and composed ones.
[3] Recent studies showed that the human brain is organized in an Holonic System for the elaboration of information to the aim of responding with an action to external stimulus. Brain’s structure is stratified in multiple levels, every one of which is built from networks of elementary units (neurons). The elaboration of information is played by the cross-connection system in the different levels of the structure. Every group of neurons is specialized to treat different types of information and play specific functions, relatively independent from the surrounding neurons. The brain is even an open system, in continuous interaction with environment and, as so, it holds systems of feedback and feed-forwards for the regulation of the exchanges with the outside, which insures the maintain of performances in the predefined standards. In difference with other opened systems, the human brain does not have a system to fix its parameters in default standards; it updates continuously to respond to the environmental changings.Fai clic qui per effettuare modifiche.
