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.
