April 23rd, 2009

Process Readiness: Are you ready to run a Marathon?

Posted by AMR Research @ 12:05 pm

Categories: ERP, Enterprise Applications, Supply Chain

Tags: Business Process, Training, Workforce Management, Training And Certification, Operational Planning, Human Resources, Business Operations, AMR Research

April 19 is Patriot’s Day in Boston.  The reenactment of the Shot Heard Round the World on Lexington Green, the parades, the Red Sox—maybe I’ll pop over to Hopkinton and run the 26 miles of the Boston Marathon.  I think not – I’ve never run more than three miles in my life!.  The real marathoners have been training on dark mornings since January getting in shape and spent years trying to qualify for a number.

 

So why do some executives think they can heard everyone into a conference room and direct the squabbling business units and departments to quickly improve business results?  Like any other high performance endeavor, this takes years of developing skills, capabilities, and organizational effectiveness.  Try to take a short cut and you may fall and be trampled miles before Heartbreak Hill.  You assess a business units readiness before rolling out the ERP system and likewise to succeed at global process improvement you need to assess your process readiness.

 

On a recent teleconference, a member of AMR Research’s SAP Peer Forum described their journey to what they called “process excellence.”  The global pharmaceutical company is subject strict regulatory requirements and President of Supply Chain was concerned that widely varied business processes across sites were not only inefficient, but exposed the company to significant compliance risk.  Over the next few years it established the three critical pillars of process readiness:

 

• Clear Goals and Process Governance – The top leader set the goal for globally harmonized business processes for efficiency, compliance, and ease of moving personnel between sites.  A process governance organization was built to drive consensus on common processes, define globally consistent metrics, direct IT projects to enhance processes, and strive for continuous improvement.
• Holistic View of the Process – Limiting the view of the process to ERP or a Six Sigma project is a recipe for underperformance.  Workers need every aspect of a process they deal with to be consistent.  The company coordinates the activity of many groups to ensure consistency of process across its multiple IT systems, manual activities, training materials, job classifications, and performance metrics.
• Business Repository and Tools – Maintaining this consistency across dozens of processes and communicating them to tens of thousands of global employees is impossible with simple documents.  Instead, the documents are brought together in a repository and a rich five layer process model links them.  Analytical tools are used to assess the impact of proposed changes and a process portal to make the process overview and training available globally.

 

The company is using IDS Scheer’s ARIS as the tool to support its process readiness efforts.  It is synchronizing it with Solution Manager on its SAP systems and linking training materials and its business intelligence systems in as well.  Similar tools exist in the Oracle E-business Suite, with the vendor reselling ARIS as Business Process Analyst (BPA) and building automated links between BPA and its Tutor process documentation and UPK training system. 

 

Just like I’m not going to run a Marathon without a lot of training, you aren’t going to improve your processes without attaining process readiness.  Over several years of effort, our SAP Peer Forum member has attained the capability of quickly implementing process improvements.  Less focused competitor may soon fall far behind.

April 10th, 2009

Next big land rush: believe it or not, is knowledge management

Posted by Kevin O'Marah @ 8:11 am

Categories: ERP, Enterprise Architecture, Intellectual Property, Supply Chain, Supply Chain Applications

Tags: Supply Chain, Collaboration, Knowledge, IP, Entertainment, Supply Chain Management (SCM), Knowledge Management, Strategy, Network Technology, Networking

This sounds silly for anyone who has ever been involved in the typical hapless library exercise of a digital “knowledge management” initiative.  The lasting image for most of these efforts is of a black hole - everything goes in, nothing comes out.  But get ready for a change of tune.

The root of this is an exploding need among all players up and down the global supply chain to harness and leverage their intellectual property without giving up control or worse, having it hijacked and used against them.  An example is the kind of engineering intensive knowledge stored in the heads of thousands of soon-to-retire manufacturing process guys in the chemicals industry.  I talked to ExxonMobil about this and found they’re keen to solve it before the IP ends up sitting on a beach in Florida somewhere.  At the exact opposite end of the spectrum is the issue of managing IP for a company like Hasbro.  They have pure entertainment images that will manifest as profitable toys like Barbie, unless someone raids the files and dumps a load of cheap counterfeit knockoffs onto the market.

How do you capture, catalog, update, distribute, and otherwise collaborate on knowledge (i.e., IP) when it ranges from expertise to trademarks?  It turns out practically every technology vendor category has an answer for you.  Collaboration vendors from little guys like Jive to big guys like OpenText have a story.  B2B and EDI guys like Sterling Commerce, GXS, and Inovis are part of the puzzle.  PLM guys like Dassault, PTC or Siemens are certainly in the mix.  Digital Rights Management vendors have been thought of largely in terms of media and entertainment uses, but players like Adobe, EMC, and even Oracle (with its Stellent property) deserve a look on this front.  Plus the security vendors like Symantec, EMC and RSA need to be considered.  And finally, all the platform guys figure into the equation - IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle all appear across the board with “solutions” in each of these categories.

The net of it all is that manufacturers and retailers across sectors will absolutely need to handle the question of how IP works its way around the global supply chain.  One worry: letting Microsoft Sharepoint creep in as the defacto standard for management of IP in interenterprise collaboration.  Its so easy to set up and start using… it naturally links to your most familiar workspace, namely Excel, PowerPoint, and the rest of MSOffice.  But where is the control and scalability?  I’m not saying Microsoft can’t do it, just that renegade groups of employees doing it on their own will almost definitely end up making a mess, and possibly and expensive one.

Missing from the list of vendors with a solid pitch here is SAP.  The ERP backbone of choice for so many companies may have a stranglehold on transactions, but they lack punch when it comes to interenterprise collaboration, relying on partners like Seeburger and Crossgate.  This may seem a sideshow in Walldorf, but every industry is beginning to see the value of stuff that is presently flying around the digital supply chain, largely unsupervised.

I’d love to hear ideas on how best to map out a strategy for this problem.

March 17th, 2009

Congratulations Marc… The next $billion will be harder

Posted by Bruce Richardson @ 8:41 am

Categories: CRM, ERP

Tags: Salesforce.com Inc., PeopleSoft Inc., Oracle Corp., Sales Force, Siebel Systems Inc., SAP AG, CRM, Sales Force Management, Sales Strategy, Software As A Service (SaaS)

In 10 years, salesforce.com founder and CEO Marc Benioff has turned CRM-as-a-service into a $1B business with 55,400 customers.  Both numbers are impressive.  It took SAP more than 35 years and an acquisition of Business Objects to cross the 50,000 customer mark (BOBJ pushed them over 80,000). 

Few application companies make it to the $1B mark.  And even fewer make it to the $2B level.  In fact, there are only three companies there today — SAP, Oracle, and Intuit.  And Intuit is questionable in the enterprise applications category as QuickBooks represents about 20% of the company’s $3.1B in 2008 revenues.  If we stretched the definition to include business intelligence/performance management, we could add SAS to the very short list ($2.267B in 2008).  Read the rest of this entry »

February 20th, 2009

Tech and the global supply chain – Who’s the MVP for work over the past ten years?

Posted by Kevin O'Marah @ 7:16 am

Categories: ERP, Supply Chain Applications

Tags:

At AMR Research we constantly study the question of applying technology to supply chain to make it work better.  Lots of old-school Lean freaks like to believe process is everything, sometimes implying that technology doesn’t really matter.  I dispute this.  Neither works well without the other, but it is certainly safe to say that without technology there would be no real global supply chain.

This got me to thinking, who, if I had to choose one, deserves the title of Most Valuable Player?  Which technology vendor has created the most business value in the global supply chain since the peak of the bubble?  A few obvious candidates come to mind: Read the rest of this entry »