Interactive business software makes internal communication as easy as social media |
There has never been a more pressing time for manufacturers to identify and exploit incremental improvements in business processes and operations. But only those manufacturers who examine their business processes and operations and identify the improvements that can exploit growth opportunities will survive.
To do this, there are three key areas manufacturers need to look at to “close the gap” by finding the often small, incremental changes and evolutions that can deliver further ROI and improve the speed, and agility of operations. The software that underpins so many of these processes is an obvious starting point.
Manufacturers now deploy a bewildering array of applications across operations, logistics, finance, HR, marketing and other departments. The alphabet soup of ERP, SCM, CRM, and HCM is now familiar parlance to most IT directors.
Amidst this plethora of systems, one of the most common challenges is integration – getting the systems to talk to each other in order to complete the processes they support. Linking the manufacture and distribution of a given order is a start, but many manufacturers now realise they need to incorporate a much wider array of concerns.
A classic example is increased production for a promotion of a given product, fusing customer demand with manufacturing, staffing, and logistics and of course invoicing. When each of these functions are handled by a different application, the gaps that can arise can become costly.
Infor 10x is equipped with ION, a lightweight middleware solution that simplifies integration between Infor and third-party applications to provide a sturdy foundation for growth with a state-of-the-art framework for managing business process flows, workflows, and alerts.
Manufacturers are classic examples of businesses that mix structured and unstructured elements within standard business processes. For example, a structured component may be the creation of a purchase order (PO), raising an invoice or issuing a Bill of Materials. These parts of the process are structured by virtue of the technology that creates and issues these documents – with the additional benefits that information is captured, stored and classified, ready for analysis and retrieval.
By comparison, the unstructured part of the process could be the approval of that PO or invoice, typically because such approval may happen over a phone call, email, text message or even via a post-it note. Typically these unstructured facets happen at the point of human interaction. Despite the fact that the real decision resides within this unstructured element of the process, it is often incredibly hard to track and record beyond this point. This gap is expensive — a 2012 report by the McKinsey Global Institute found: “The average interaction worker spends an estimated 28% of the working week managing e-mail and nearly 20% looking for internal information or tracking down colleagues who can help with specific tasks.” That is a huge loss of productivity.
Infor 10x features Infor Ming.le, a comprehensive platform for collaboration and business process improvement. Incorporating innovative social media concepts into a business environment, the software lets customers capture corporate knowledge, tie ‘human’ communications to automated business processes, and follow news, workflows, and content in real-time. All comments, approvals, notes and details are captured in a single place with direct access to the underlying applications to which they pertain.
A hypothetical example could be that a sales executive at a manufacturer of disk brakes receives a rush order from a major automotive OEM. He enters this into Infor Ming.le and receives an alert that the order will not be able to be fulfilled in the timeframe requested by the customer. Embedded intelligence in the software also shows that the OEM is one of the company’s top three customers.
Because it draws information from multiple applications into a single platform, the sales executive is able to directly view the production schedule and see that maintenance work on a large piece of equipment is causing the delay in fulfilling the order. Wanting to please a top customer, but not knowing who in the company handles production scheduling, he shares the purchase order with a message to the production group.
The software, knowing who at the company is responsible for production scheduling at the plant assigned to this order, alerts the production manager directly in her Infor Ming.le feed. The production manager sees that the scheduled maintenance is preventative and adjusts the schedule so it can be conducted once the order is complete. This triggers an alert back to the sales executive who lets his customer know that the order will be delivered on time.
Through the software, the sales executive and production manager were able to solve a critical business issue despite not knowing each other, in a matter of minutes. In addition, all actions and interactions were transparent to all users and saved to the original purchase order providing a clear audit trail.
Silos of information remain a key concern for many manufacturers. Individual instances of data are useful but all too often, it is a case that when placed alongside each other in the correct context, the result is greater than the sum of its parts. This requires powerful analytics and business intelligence (BI) integrated with simple and intuitive methods of displaying the information. Furthermore, this analysis and display needs to be available anywhere – manufacturing decision makers are no longer chained to a desk.
This makes the issue of the interface a critical concern. As decision makers have become accustomed to simple, intuitive apps on a smartphone or on their Facebook account, questions have begun to be asked as to why business software cannot look and feel as inviting and easy to use.
Closing these gaps in understanding, processes and systems will be the hallmark of successful manufacturers in the coming months. Integrated, contextually informed processes that span structured and unstructured facets will be the cornerstone of profitable manufacturing growth.