You’ve seen it too often; dreadfully boring PowerPoint presentations killing audience participation. Or one assertive executive forcing his or her view on how business processes and SAP should work. How about company projects to improve the Supply Chain based on which VP yells the loudest?
All these methods are incredibly outdated and as technology and processes become more and more sophisticated you need to capitalize on your best resources. Here is what you need to do.
- Start by looking at the big picture. Get your best executives and your SAP experts in a room and let a facilitator get them to take a good honest look at the Supply Chain. Take a look at how Sales integrates with Planning, Production, Purchasing, Materials Management, Warehousing and of course Finance. You don’t need details right now. Identify the biggest bottlenecks, pain points and integration issues in the process. Let them all duke it out. You’ll be pleasantly surprised at what comes out and how it can create a first-rate team effort.
- All the facilitator needs is large colored post its, a wall or paper to stick them on, one list for issues and one for parking lot items. He should create a high level flow chart of the Supply Chain for the audience to talk to. And please get the audience to write out and stick on the post its. This keeps everyone on their toes and creates more participation. The end result should be a process flow and a list of key improvements that everyone has agreed upon and maybe even prioritized. The parking lot items should be addressed later. Then take this method and repeat it as required. Its really a Six Sigma work shop method.
I’ve used this method many times and it works beautifully. Once we mapped out a company’s high level Purchasing process and identified at least 7-8 major issues including decentralized purchasing with no cost control, lack of regulatory controls and of course many SAP tools that were not in use highlighting huge inefficiencies in the whole process. The Procurement director shut down the project out of embarrassment or fright.
Recently I helped design and facilitate a great session. We gathered about 22 executives and knowledgeable employees to decide if implementing SAP in the R & D facility should be a company priority. As you know implementing SAP can a complicated affair (to say the least) but at the end of the day we had agreement across the board, identified the key bottles neck areas and had created a terrific team synergy in the end.
SAP offers incredible tools that so many companies only scratch the surface of. Get your SAP experts and best employees in workshops like these and make sure your Team and Supply Chain becomes World Class.