Brad Power, popular blogger for the Harvard Business Review and overall big thinker, recently posted a blog that I found to be important: Three Examples of New Process Strategy http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/12/in_my_last_post_i_1.html

He quoted a famous writer who said “The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed”.  Brad’s use of this quote to describe Process Strategy 2.0 is so very true.  He further said you don’t have to wait “for some breakthrough technology to emerge; it’s already here, albeit in bits and pieces”.  BabbleWare has been delivering on this strategy since 1998 for industry leaders in Retail, Manufacturing, Healthcare and 3PL.

3 Key Areas

Brad identified three ways that process improvements will dramatically change in the coming decade:

1)      expand the scope of work managed by a company to include customers, suppliers, and partners;

2)      target the increasing amount of knowledge work; and

3)      reduce cycle times to durations previously considered impossible

We’ve all seen the ads promoting a product that can help us lose weight.  While weight loss is far from easy it is, however, a simple equation: too much intake of food results in too much of me.  The same can be said for your Supply Chain.  This time though instead of monitoring the amount of food you are monitoring the amount of transactions.  A transaction is what one person is doing at one time to complete a task that contributes to the overall needs of the business: i.e. assembling a part, receiving inventory, or selecting/picking product to fulfill demand.  That person can be an Employee, Vendor or Customer.

Previous blogs have written about the 64 Transactions that constitute your Supply Chain.  While we can’t be sure if 64 is the right number for your company; it does serve as a reminder that there are an awful lot of transactions going on in your Supply Chain leading to bloated lead times, shipping error rates, direct labor costs and inventory levels.

So how can you shrink your Supply Chain?  Take control of those transactions.  Develop a list of transactions, or use ours, as your starting point.

We’ve all been there before; a change to business is required so you turn to IT to get their assistance and they say NO! before you even ask the question.  I have come to discover that IT is not populated with evil people bent on destroying the company by refusing to cooperate.  Instead it is staffed with very bright people that have been conditioned to say NO!  Because they are intelligent they realize that any request you make of them is going to require resources, budget, time and risk that they simply can’t afford.   The existing systems (ERP, Homegrown, Best of Breed, etc.) condition IT to say NO! and you to add an S. and an H. to their department.

As the late Rodney King famously said; ‘Can we all get along?’  For the sake of your business and even your job the answer must be yes.  So how do we help our friends in IT remove the S. and H. from their unofficial letterhead?  Isolate the existing enterprise systems.