April 2006
3 Factors Driving Operational Excellence
A large medical device manufacturer lacked real-time data to support timely decisions for the logistics, manufacturing, and supply chain operations of its business.
The management team needed better insight into its business operations issues to take the right actions and improve efficiency. The company CFO accepted the challenge of running the project. He faced a big cultural hurdle: getting operations management to rely on a standardized system for the data to make decisions affecting sales, delivery, and customer service processes was a political nightmare. If he could create an environment that would break through that barrier without breaking the budget, he knew it would be a big win for the firm.
The secrets to simplifying business metrics
Three concepts drove the planning—design simplicity, content consistency, and a longitudinal, phased and evolving process —were at the center of every decision the design team made:
- Keep it simple—The team settled on creating dashboards to display operational metrics to key managers by area of responsibility. These managers could then drill into supporting reports and data to gain more insight into the contributing factors that led metric performance.
- Make it consistent—Rather than having competing versions of numbers that need constant and time-consuming reconciliation, build out a single source of truth—whether it’s physical or logical—to support operational decisions. The team felt they could cross that concern off the list when the source of data was consistent and beyond internal argument.
- Make it evolutionary—If they tried to hit every metric from the start, it would take too long—time the CFO knew they didn’t have at the start of the process. Their process had to be capable of evolving over time to incorporate changes in the business and additional information sources. To stay on track, the company chose to first address operational performance as the critical performance issues: supply chain, sales, and logistics.
In designing any system in a complex manufacturing or service environment, it would be well to follow this model. KISS -- keep it simple. Use facts to overcome opinions and build in a means to get at the facts that drive success. Look at the process from a longitudinal scope -- build in the capability to start simple and evolve with the business. Fix today what is most important today ... and then move step-by-step toward the full vision.
Posted by Dale Wolf on April 15, 2006 at 09:47 AM in Business Optimization | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Facts Beat Down Opinions
The most difficult part of managing a global website is that so many managers have different and conflicting opinions on what the site should do and how it should be organized and what it should look like. It's not that anyone is being wrong-headed. Everyone is trying to make the project successful. But we all come from such different points of view that an enterprise-wide project of this sort becomes difficult.
The key learning is that we all have opinions and few of us have facts to support the opinions. This is true of the website, or a CRM project or a supply chain management project ... any project that crosses business units in a diverse corporation is subject to a kind of corporate schizophrenia.
So, for business managers venturing into such projects, analytics is the essential tool
And it appears that analytics is catching on ... nearly 90% of respondents plan on using more Web analytics tools in 2006. This according to Forrester's Customer Experience Peer Research Panel.
It seems that marketers are finally starting to realize there's gold in those click streams and shopping carts. There are plenty of great tools, even free ones. We use Webtrends and it gives us visibility into what our customers are reading (and not reading) ... analytics has been at the base of our last two website overhauls.
A key observation is that everytime we place what I call "early stage content" on the site, it gets good traction. Early stage content is stuff we write about customer pains and issues rather than about our products. Prospects who are in the early stage of investigating software solutions want to get a better handle on the problems. Once they are confident of their position, they move up the buying cycle and start looking at product content. So our next web improvement that we are now working on is focused on content useful to early stage prospects.
Posted by Dale Wolf on April 3, 2006 at 11:38 AM in Business Optimization | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Overcoming Adversity
Obstacles, challenges, and tragedies are all part of life. Unavoidable. But lessons learned and shared from real-life experiences can help us in our life of business or business of life. Steve Kayser has authored a humorous essay filled with important lessons for success ... read Find Your Ode to Joy.
Posted by Dale Wolf on April 3, 2006 at 11:25 AM in Business Optimization | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
