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The key human factor in a successful supply chain transformation

I was born and grew up in South America, my parents always told me to work hard and aim for the stars. Graduated top of my class with an engineering degree and quickly joined the workforce in supply chain and technology related roles across a few industries … I have lived and worked in many countries around the world and beyond all the wonderful life experiences that has given me it has taught me one important life lesson:

“Just because it is different does not mean it is wrong”

Embracing change and diversity of thought is a very important capability one can only gain benefits from.

So why do I say this in a supply chain article?

I say this because supply chain is a network of networks. Organisational functions across plan, sell, deliver, make and source comprised by people with different skills and different functional objectives in most cases (unfortunately) are very poorly aligned. For them, diversity of thought is significantly present in the sense of different ways of seeing something like an objective, process, business rule, requirement even a functional metric.

With the technological advances organisations have access to today, overall performances should be significantly better than what we see recorded. So why isn’t that the case?

One word: Misalignment

I recently read a fantastic article written by one of my favourite analysts Lora Cecere (see link)

Balance score card level performance and metrics are directly affected by the level of organisational misalignment.

Improving organisational alignment is not an easy task. It requires three very important components:

1. Something to align to and under (vision, goal, objective, priority).

2. People’s ability to feed from thought diversity as opposed to dispute or reject it without much consideration (especially the ones driving and executing change).

3. Accountability measured by a clear performance metric (one or two at the most).

For Supply Chains, as Lora Cecere puts it - the journey is outside-in. Start with your customer experience objectives and work your way in. Your front end operations (like marketing, customer service , sales, etc.) will only be as good as your backend operation areas enable them to be. And they both form the end-to-end customer experience cycle, so there is definitely a new way to describe what alignment means to your organisation.

Use cycle and operational metrics to keep the teams accountable beyond their vertical/silo metrics managed today.

Finally, optimising and transforming your supply chain is far bigger than your next technology project. The outside-in business design approach can easily extrapolate to a solution design when we see technology just as another organisational capability in your service design. Avoid at all cost starting tech projects driven by the wonderful things that tech can do - instead start with your customer experience -> business value and only then -> how tech delivers both.

Happy to hear your comments, experience and thoughts on this topic - none of it is new and yet somehow we still haven’t mastering it.

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Enterprise Mobility - Pilots or PoC's??

There is an interesting decision point and topic in the enterprise mobility area that has been resonating over the last few weeks in many organisations looking to 'mobilise' their enterprise: PoC's vs. Pilots

PoC's, i believe, are a double edge sword and sometimes miss-confused with pilots.  PoC's are good to visualise an idea or concept, proof its way of working and useful to translate a set of requirements into a working prototype. However, PoC can also stall a project when not done properly; and it can just remain as that - PoC Rather than a PoC, i recommend a pilot. The difference with a PoC, a pilot will become a mini template of the use case that considers all its relevant areas (benefits, integration, user experience, etc). A PoC will only focus on building the working app and its features in isolation. Our recommendation is to select a small group in the business area you are trying to mobilise and, design, build and deploy a pilot.

Involve those end users and create a cross functional team (small to start with) to do the pilot. Once deployed and proven successful, scale the team up and select rollout areas for next releases.  The beauty of the pilot is that it will allow you to increase the depth of business requirements it will support and the breadth of business applications it will integrate to. This as progressive and not big bang.

Finally and most importantly; the pilot sponsor will be accountable to deliver on the business case and objectives set at the beginning. A PoC sponsor will be accountable to prototype an idea and see it working, but not necessarily integrated with the rest of the organisation or aligned to specific business benefits.

Your thoughts? - which avenue has your organisation taken?

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Why mobility is NOT the answer

Organisations and CIO offices have included mobile in their agendas and budgets. However, when searching on what part of their organisation should go mobile they struggle to see & understand the disruptions of it in their day to day operations and on their existing application landscapes. Mobility is not the answer and why mobile is not even the question. Organisations understand they want productivity gains, connected employees, new channels to reach customers and suppliers... But deploying apps as part of mobility is not the single answer. The answer is how they decide to do it. The answer is really the journey to mobility. Only their approach to mobility will really give the results in productivity, collaboration and revenue avenues of growth. Key considerations to have a solid journey: *End user involvement and focus *Three way security architecture *Agility *Incremental deployments for new features/ new apps Only when these 4 key areas are covered, the organisation is in the right journey to the mobility answer. More to come...