Reap the Benefits of Operational Excellence
In last week’s blog we discussed the importance of enhancing your operational methods and how, as a result, with the help of Third Wave Business Systems, you can create a path to your own operational excellence. We also touched on the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that measure that excellence and accelerate your business decisions in the right direction. To keep on the same path, it’s important to take a look at what business processes are required and how achieving operational excellence is not as difficult as you may think. It can become a seamless part of your everyday business life!
How will you use this approach to reaching operational excellence? Consider how your enterprise planning process works currently. Chances are the communication between manufacturing and customer demand just isn’t there. Often, throughput is constrained by inflexible processes and systems. If you struggle to bridge the demand and execution gap, you are most likely not aligned with customer demand, and as a result financial and delivery performance depreciates. So what do you do? How do you pull yourself out of this pseudo-rut & set in search of operational excellence?
Your goal is to maximize throughput and return on investment (ROI). That’s a given. Luckily, SAP Business One, with the help of Third Wave Business Systems, can help bring increased visibility and responsiveness to your operations while integrating manufacturing into the mix. Recognizing & acting on this is the first step to meeting customer demand. Some ways that SAP enables you to do this are:
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- By piecing together parts of different applications into seamless processes
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- Taking your pain points into account and what business processes need improvement
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- Separating each business process into a series of implementable steps
- Evaluating which business processes are core to your needs and implement each step at a time before moving on to another
Simply put, in order for the above process to work, you need integrated applications. Working off of multiple, disparate systems won’t cut it. You need your systems to be able to “talk to each other”, meaning you need to be able to communicate information through a series of channels. The good thing is that this is entirely possible with SAP Business One & Third Wave Business Systems. Once you get past this point, you’ll realize how easily you can adapt as your demands and processes change over time, involving your entire business network along the way.
Instead of asking the question, “what can SAP do for customers today?” the better question should be, “what CAN’T SAP do for customers?” Your next step is to prepare yourself for this new approach when you’re considering any new systems and as you develop your company’s long term IT strategy. Contact us today & learn how to align your IT plans and operational business strategies with an SAP Business One process-focused mindset.
Weiland, Rolf, “Achieving Operational Excellence. How SAP’s Process Approach Arms You with the Tools You Need,” SAPinsider Feature Article, www.WISpubs.com, July-August 2008, www.SAPinsideronline.com