“Operations leaders know they have a problem but aren’t quite sure what the solution is.”

This statement continues to echo around the meetings I attend, the challenge is there are many parts to the dynamic situation we find ourselves and they are all converging at the same time.

The Top 3 operational challenges faced by executives tells us that functional silos of people and systems continue to frustrate them and they need help justifying potential solutions to address these challenges.

It also explains why software categories like Manufacturing Execution Systems has limited awareness outside the plant. Also the growing discussion around platforms to accommodate the variety and provide basis for absorption of differences, while applying consistent changes.

A big discussion last week with 3 different groups, but it all came back to trusted , validate data that decisions can be made on. It was clear that much of the recorded data when actually taken and moved to a basis for business decisions, that people had to stop with grand plans of information and knowledge, they had to go back to getting basics sorted with validate, trusted data.

While the diagram above indicates 48% had issues with collaboration across departments, (very true, just transparency and communication is an issue) but in two sessions it was clear terminology and alignment for these conversations was a basis for significant part of the problem. Between systems/ applications, and people.

What shocked me in the conversations was how people were taking a very pointed (local) approach to solving the issues of terminology and structure, and not looking at how to make it “sustainable innovation”. The models and approaches must not be “band aids” they must structured and sustainable, avoiding anything that is not “managed”.

The process of delivering goods and services better, faster and cheaper sounds simple but can sometimes be unpredictable and lead to shortages or surpluses. Over the past two decades, the supply chain journey has evolved through a number of distinct phases along with a shift in power from suppliers to customers. Over the course of this evolution, operations professionals have expanded their perspective and philosophy from an inventory-centric view in the 1980s to an order-centric view in the ’90s to a product-centric view today. As product lifecycles shrink, innovation has risen to the top of the CEO agenda. But product innovation cannot meet the business objectives of lifecycle profitability without supply chain process considerations.

Future operations professionals need to get involved in the product development process to enable both product and process innovation. The product lifecycle perspective becomes more important as it provides a holistic view across disparate enterprise silos to provide a coordinated response to the end-customer — who is the ultimate driver of demand. Integration of product lifecycle and supply chain management can provide fresh perspectives and critical insights that are often missed due to the extreme fragmentation of functions within the enterprise and across supply chains. This is the new frontier for value creation, an untapped area of opportunity to create competitive differentiation and growth for businesses

Making money is no longer from a transaction. It is from a customer experience for a lifetime.

As companies grapple with their own journey to “Operational Excellence” they must gain control on their information and data, otherwise the alignment and collberation, across teams, for actionable decisions will fail.

More and more of the problems we face today don’t have easy answers. Solving these hard problems require “integrative thinking”, a concept put forward by Roger Martin in his book, The Opposable Mind. Martin defines the term as follows: “The ability to face constructively the tension of opposing ideas and, instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, generate a creative resolution of the tension in the form of a new idea that contains elements of the opposing ideas but is superior to each”. Rather than accepting conventional tradeoffs where you choose either X OR Y, integrative thinking is about pushing the boundaries and searching for creative resolutions which give you X AND Y.