Don’t Sweat the Transformation
You Can Drive Success Across People, Process, Technology and Data Dimensions
By Clay Thomas, Principal ArganoSCMO2
Just because temperatures are rising with the onset of summer doesn’t mean you also need to feel the heat in your transformation to modern supply chain cloud tools. Nearly everyone we talk with indicates that either their suppliers have them on allocation or they have their own customers on allocation.
Updating demand plans to signal production plans to your manufacturing plant used to be a somewhat regular, albeit sluggish, process. But those processes are no longer relevant. You simply cannot wait weeks, or even a few days, to adjust or expedite your plans when the variables that impact production change daily.
Not only do you need tools that keep up with ever-changing market conditions, your resources must also be supported more effectively by process. Implementing any new tools much be, just as importantly, accompanied by an improvement in the workflows that feed those tools and development of the skills necessary to effectively execute these processes.
With more than 20 years of experience with SAP tools, we are once again seeing an uptick in companies that are lured by “low cost” implementations focused too much on setup of the technical tool itself, but abandon the customer when it comes to learning how to best use it. Yes, cloud tools can be implemented more quickly. And, particularly in this dynamic and volatile market, you want the tool as fast as possible.
But in the present challenging labor environment, companies are not only dealing with retirements, but resources that refuse to return to the office and a younger generation that changes jobs more frequently. A tighter labor market may result in a supply chain team that does not know your business well enough or may lack the fundamental skills required to apply functionality or follow “good” processes in shifting from (for example) targeting intelligent inventory reduction to better deployment of constrained supply.
As a result, it is more important than ever to ensure your transformation to today’s tools includes a focus on improving your processes and addressing the organizational impact in making these changes. We have refined and adapted our implementation methodology to bring this process improvement into clearer focus and in concert with tool setup. With LIFT, you are assured that beyond the “go live” of the tool, your resources fully understand that their roles in setting the tool are intended to support their processes, and as such, will create stronger adoption and higher use over the long term.
Check out the highlights of our LIFT methodology and reach out to learn how ArganoSCMO2 can help you meet today’s supply chain challenges head-on. Without breaking a sweat!
