You have had a number of people pass through your company with brilliant suggestions on how to fix your business. IT has their own ideas; Six Sigma brings their own methods, Sales promises new records and all those new Vice Presidents you hire? They all have plenty of years of experience, probably advanced degrees and are ready to save your Supply Chain or S&OP …or even the world!
The reality is that there are no shortcuts to making a business more flexible, disciplined, profitable and a cool place to work. There are no gurus that will magically transform your Supply Chain issues with a wave of a wand. It really is about Team Work, Data and Collaboration. Oh, and RACI charts.
Find an excellent facilitator that can bring executives and SME’s together and have an honest and open discussion while creating Visio representations of your current Business flows. If you don’t know your AS IS state, map it out and then map out the TO BE business process flows. In the TO BE flows focus on areas that you believe are bottlenecks in the Supply Chain. Bottleneck focusing is always a good start!
FFS don’t make it boring! I like to have TO BE mapping sessions done with Post-it’s on plain brown paper. Nobody is spared. Everyone gets a pack of colorful Post-its. Everyone collaborates on the future mapping. I will not tolerate executives or SME’s sitting around with bored expressions or tapping silently on their phone. Mapping new and improved business processes as a team should be an engaging and creative exercise and in the end your best business process improvements will come to light. After that, the Post-its are scotch taped together on the paper and then transformed into Visio diagrams.
Use a Simple Method to Extract Critical Data. You should have a pretty good grasp by now on how your KPI’s are doing. Right? If not you are in big trouble. Sure you can do all the mapping you want, but you need data to support your business transformation arguments. If you SAY you have big inventory bottlenecks holding up production or you SAY your profits are affected then the data should support what you SAY. I’ve had most of my experience in a SAP system and there are about 300 standard reports and lists that you can simply extract data directly from. Data mining doesn’t have to be complicated.
Create a RACI chart if you don’t have any. RACI charts clearly describe who is Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed. Mapping out process flows or extracting data is the easy part, the hard part is finding out if the right people are in the right positions and dong the right things. RACI charts are eye openers for many businesses.
There you have it. You now have a complete blueprint of where you want your business to go. You should know which areas are affecting your profits and you can now prioritize what to tackle first. And you have a picture if the right people are doing the right things
Simple isn’t it?
Terry Vermeylen is hell bent on rapidly transforming your business into a World Class Operation by major transformation or by eliminating one bad habit at a time.
Terry Vermeylen brings 30+ years of experience in SAP and Supply Chain Process improvement. As an SAP professional and Supply Chain Architect he has worked and consulted for some of the world’s largest and most successful manufacturing companies focusing primarily on the Aerospace and Pharmaceutical industries as well as the US Military.
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