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Business Process Innovation
white paperRepeatable Profit Velocity Will Drive Sustainable and Profitable Growth In recent years, industry leading companies have identified business process innovation as the only realcompetitive advantage. This resulted from the realization that all companies with access to similar materialsand the use of outsourcing can provide virtual scale to any size company. Minimizing the time opportunityidentification to scale will be the only sustainable differentiation. Every company has an example a depart-mental process - a select few project or product launches that were stellar and considered best-in-class orfirst-to-market. What sets the most admired process companies apart from the rest is their continued business process innovation and scale.
With evolving global market and technology, virtual scale through collaboration can increase innovation, pro-vide capacity or increase capacity agility, reduce costs, improve quality and drive revenue. To benefit fromthis emerging opportunity, companies must move from departmental or silo focus to extended enterpriseprocesses. This is validated by a recent GMA Insomnia in the Corner Office Whitepaper finding that manyCEOs are concerned that internal business model constraints limit the company's ability to achieve theirpotential growth rates. Regardless of whether your ERP solution is designed to meet your needs, heavily customized or limited by overly restrictive best practices that only provide industry parity, you still need toincrease your profit velocity and virtual scale. While most companies can't get there in one step, a businessprocess innovation mentality will allow you to incrementally improve and realize financial benefits.
Many companies have embarked on initiatives like GDSN, Global Specification Management, Lean manufac-turing and many have achieved at least some level of value. However, these companies still are not realizingbest-in-class results. While each department or process may be optimized or best-in-class, adjacent process-es or stand alone system limits impede your ability to achieve optimal supply chains and best-in-class enter-prise results. Many software companies or consultants can provide a compelling vision of solutions used by aselect few industry leading companies that can afford to heavily customize integrated modules from theirERP supplier.
Too often companies are blinded by promised integration TCO claims and try to force fit the ERP vendors'horizontal add-on modules. To obtain the same results achieved by the industry leaders, most companiescannot afford the same level of customization and lengthy implementations.
The financial results can be less than stellar. Heavy customization has another side-effect - change is notsupported. To achieve profit velocity and succeed in the new global marketplace, change is the only con-stant. New laws, consumer preferences, mega-retailer or customer demands, new markets, extended supplychains, increased outsourcing, etc., happen and they can't react. If they can't react at the same rate as theirmega-competitors or agile small competitors that have virtual scale, survival will be a struggle.
How can you get started on a continual improvement path that leverages business process enhancement toachieve repeatable velocity capabilities and virtual scale - and ultimately achieve sustainable and profitablegrowth?
2 |Extending the Value of Your ERP SolutionLet's start with ERP - often your biggest IT investment and one companies are often reluctant to replace.How can you extend your ERP value in an evolutionary manner? One challenge to achieving this value is acompletely ERP-centric model. If all information is expected to be created in ERP or a Master DataManagement (MDM) strategy is mandated, then you're probably doing the equivalent of "driving a car bylooking in the rear view mirror." While MDM and ERP are critical for change management and keeping production systems working, the focus is on transaction and master data.
ERP and MDM are not designed to support information required in many other applications - like optimiza-tion rules for scheduling, experimental data, nutritional rules, etc. If ERP or MDM were used for this pur-pose, custom coding would be required, lead times are extended by processing information through collabo-rative ERP information maintenance processes and these requests are likely lower prioritie... [download for more]
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